Tag: dyslexia

Letter Spacing and Readability (particularly for dyslexia)

Letter spacing. Read this.

Two European researchers have demonstrated that increasing the spacing between letters help students with dyslexia read faster, bumping up their reading ability by about a year. Their app for testing your best reading spacing, DYS, is free.

Robert Lee Hotz has the details.

Unlike having to use expensive fonts, like dyslexie, letter spacing is very easy to change on a webpage, and anyone should be able to change the preferences on their browser; for Mozilla Firefox you can change the letter-spacing using User CSS (which is not quite as easy as changing it in the preferences).

ᔥ Hotz, 2012.

Making Text Easier to Read

Christian Boer, who is dyslexic, has come up with a new font designed to make text easier for dyslexics to read. There are a number of changes to the letters themselves, such as making the bottoms heavier, enlarging the openings, and making similar letters look more different. But, Boer’s website also offers advice on how to lay out text: separate paragraphs with space; avoid right justification; use columns instead of having text across the entire page, and so on.

Unfortunately, the Dyslexie font is not yet available in the U.S..

When I was choosing the layout for this blog, I was aiming for something that would be easy and enjoyable for me to read; I tend to be a little picky about my reading and writing environment. Interestingly, many of my own preferences align well with the ones noted above, but there seem to be a number of improvements I can still make to improve readability for everyone. Abigail Marshall has some additional advice on Web Design for Dyslexic Users.