One of the difficulties faced by children, and adults, who have dyslexia involves reading. Many font types are not easy for dyslexic brain’s to discern. A font called Open-Dyslexic can be downloaded for free. This could help your child to read!
As a person who is dyslexic, I can tell you from experience that reading isn’t always easy. There are a lot of coping mechanisms I use in order to be able to read a news article, and to write about it, in a way that will make sense for other people. Spellcheck is useful. I edit everything I put online at least three times, to make sure that I haven’t accidentally typed the word “sue” when I wanted to type the word “use”.
For me, reading is (usually) manageable. However, if I’m tired, or not feeling well, my ability to discern one letter from another decreases dramatically. My dyslexia is extremely noticeable if you ask me to do a math problem, balance a checkbook, run a cash register, or comprehend data that is in numerical format. I just can’t do it. Nothing helps, and it is frustrating. I figure this is how kids with dyslexia feel when they are first learning how to read.
There is now a font that is designed for people who have dyslexia. It was originally created by a Dutch graphic artist named Christian Boer. He created a font where the letters had gravity, and were not entirely symmetrical in certain ways. The purpose was to prevent dyslexic brains from reading a “b” as a “d”, or even as a “p”. You can read more about it on the Dyslexie website.
There is another font called OpenDyslexic. It is open source, which means that anyone who has the ability to do so can alter and improve upon it. It is free to download. The OpenDyslexic font can be used on the Safari web browser and the Chrome web browser. The Instapaper app has recently added OpenDyslexic to the list of fonts that it supports.
This is incredible! It means that a parent can put the OpenDyslexic font onto their family computer, and suddenly, their child who used to struggle to read a web page can do it. I think that it would be fairly easy for schools to add the OpenDyslexic font to school computers, or, at least the ones used in a Special Education classroom. The world just got a little bit easier to comprehend for children and adults who are dyslexic.
Image by Tetsukun0105 on Flickr