You should know there's a font designed to make reading easier, especially for people with low vision. It's called Atkinson Hyperlegible Next. It's free for personal and commercial use.
You should know there's a font designed to make reading easier, especially for people with low vision. It's called Atkinson Hyperlegible Next. It's free for personal and commercial use.
Read easier with Atkinson Hyperlegible Font, crafted for low-vision readers. Download for free and enjoy clear letters and numbers on your computer!
Note that there still have been no studies on its efficacy. At worst, it is a great font to avoid ambiguity between characters.
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This is nowhere near as good as the Open Dyslexic font. It looks weird, and I'm not dyslexic, but damn it makes me able to read so much faster!
I wish there was an open font that tries to do the same thing, but with an aesthetic that wasn't reminiscent of comic sans.
You're looking at it, the one linked In the op lmao
The Hyperlegible web site makes no mention of dyslexia, only visual impairment. Those are two totally different issues.
Well yes but beauty standards for typography run counter to accommodating for dyslexia, especially for sans serifs. Similarity in shapes, curves, weights, and stroke width are seen as beautiful, but they're exactly what must be given up for more accessible typography.
Someone else in the comments here did mention Bionic Reading though, and there's a free alternative in Fast Font, which has a gradient of weights for each word from black for the first letter to thin for the last one. Might be something to consider
I like how that font disambiguates glyphs that often get confused, but I found it to be pretty hard to look at, honestly. I think the main issue might be that the line thickness appears to be uniform at all parts in all letters.
See my reply to the other person for a couple of fonts to try :)
But comic sans is funny
You're right, I'm going to change all my fonts to comic sans (or whatever open-source variant might exist)...
I find it ironic that their website has extremely low contrasting colors making it very hard to read.
(Look at the top left for the worst example)
Yeah it's almost impossible to read
This looks like the font used on shroom tshirts
I actually changed my Anki to OpenDyslexic a couple of months ago! I changed it again when Atkinson Hyperlegible Next came out, but I agree that OpenDyslexic makes reading a breeze.
My only grievance with OpenDyslexic is that I don't think I could send reports with this font without pushback. On the other hand, I have sent multiple reports using Atkinson Hyperlegible and nobody has ever said a thing.
I find this harder to read than almost any other "normal" font. I wonder if I have some other reading impairment I've never been aware of - having recently discovered I'm also not neurotypical
To be honest, studies around whether this font is actually easier to read for people with dyslexia haven't shown that to be the case. At least, that's what I remember from reading about it in a Dutch skeptic magazine (Skepter) some time ago. So if you have dyslexia and find this font harder to read, that doesn't have to say anything about you.
EDIT: this seems to be the article I read, though it's from ten years ago.
As a dyslexic its very hard to read. But dyslexia isn't one thing. Its a broad catch all category diagnosis. So im sure it does help some. But damn its also ugly...
I wish this font worked for me. I think my brain is defective.
I wonder how it works. Maybe it has to do with the intentional varying of the sizes of holes in letters, and the lopsided lines so one can't be confused as another.
While dyslexia is actually a cluster of related issues, a common one seems to be with dimensionality. Basically, the reader's brain assumes the objects are 3 dimensional. When the eyes make micro adjustments, the letters don't rotate, since they are 2D. The brain misinterprets this as them rotating, or moving. This is perceived as them flickering or moving, in the corner of your eye.
There are several ways to break this effect. I suspect the shape is intended to mess with and slightly overload the depth sense. Strong colours can also disrupt it. E.g. via a coloured filter or glasses.
Just to note, my knowledge/research on this was 20 years ago, so might be outdated now. The coloured filters (actually tinted reading glasses) did help a relative overcome dyslexia however.
