Youki Terada, writing for Edutopia in 2022 (via Jens Kutílek):
Under close scrutiny, the evidence for dyslexia-friendly fonts
falls apart. In a 2017 study, for example, researchers tested
whether OpenDyslexic, a popular font with thicker lines near the
bottom of the letters, could improve the reading rate and accuracy
for young children with dyslexia. According to the developers of
the font, which is open-source and free of charge, the “heaviness”
of the letters prevented them from turning upside down for readers
with dyslexia, which they claimed would improve reading accuracy
and speed.Researchers put the font to the test, comparing it with two other
popular fonts designed for legibility — Arial and Times New Roman — and discovered that the purportedly dyslexia-friendly font
actually reduced reading speed and accuracy. In addition, none of
the students preferred to read material in OpenDyslexic, a
surprising rebuke for a font specifically designed for the task.In a separate 2018 study, researchers compared another popular
dyslexia font — Dyslexie, which charges a fee for usage — with
Arial and Times New Roman and found no benefit to reading
accuracy and speed. As with the previous dyslexia font, children
expressed a preference for the mainstream fonts. “All in all, the
font Dyslexie, developed to facilitate the reading of dyslexic
people, does not have the desired effect,” the researchers
concluded. “Children with dyslexia do not read better when text
is printed in the font Dyslexie than when text is printed in
Arial or Times New Roman.”
Quoting from the abstract of the first study cited above:
Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no
improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students
with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some
students commented that [OpenDyslexic] was “new” or “different”,
none of the participants reported preferring to read material
presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no
benefit for translating print materials to this font.
The problem isn’t dyslexia if you don’t notice that OpenDyslexic is “different”.
Quoting from the second cited study:
Words written in Dyslexie font were not read faster or more
accurately. Moreover, participants showed a preference for the
fonts Arial and Times New Roman rather than Dyslexie, and again,
preference was not related to reading performance. These
experiments clearly justify the conclusion that the Dyslexie font
neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with
and without dyslexia.
OpenDyslexic’s website has a “related research” page but of the four articles they link to, three are 404s, and the other one only studied “extra-large letter spacing”. I chased down the correct link to one of the other articles they cite, and the only fonts it studied were Verdana, Arial, Georgia, and Times.
Some people claim to prefer reading text set with OpenDyslexic. Some people like Comic Sans, too. But I was unaware that these typefaces that purport to be designed specifically to benefit people with dyslexia are based on misguided beliefs that dyslexia is a visual problem, and that actual research shows they do not provide the benefits they claim to. They’re just ugly fonts.
