What Are the Best Fonts for Dyslexia?

Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Agatha Christie and Steve Jobs – this might seem as a completely random list of famous people in history, but they all have something in common. They have all struggled with dyslexia.

Research shows that around 1 in 10 people have dyslexia. This means around 780 million people in the whole world struggle with this type of learning disability. Only in the USA there are more than 40 million people with dyslexia, but only 2 million of them received a diagnosis.

Dyslexia can cause mild to severe difficulties in the way we read and write. With different types of teaching methods and through a lot of emotional support dyslexic people can lead normal lives.

Websites and mobile apps can help by adjusting their content to be manageable by dyslexic people. That happens through different fonts, spacing of the words and other means of design. So, let’s see what that means.

What is Dyslexia and What Problems Do People With It Encounter?

Contrary to popular belief, dyslexia is not a disease. Instead, it’s categorized as a learning disability or learning disorder. In fact, it’s the most common learning disability.

One other name for it is word blindness. It can affect either reading or writing, or both. In layman terms - dyslexia can cause difficulty in identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to written words and letters

Scientists believe that dyslexia comes from the interaction between genetic and environmental factors, it can sometimes run in families. Dyslexia can also develop from a traumatic brain injury and then it’s called acquired dyslexia.

What Are The Most Common Signs of Dyslexia?

Problems can vary both in severity and type.

The most common ones are:

• Difficulty spelling;;
• Slow reading
• Mispronouncing words;
• Reading problems;
• Confusing letter for each other;
• Messy handwriting;
• Mixing up sequences of letters.

All of these and also other problems can cause anxiety and depression in people suffering from dyslexia, it can lead to low self-esteem and unwillingness to participate in day-to-day activities.

What Problems Do People With Dyslexia Encounter?

Since learning difficulties can impact our whole lives, oftentimes people with dyslexia suffer even as adults. Dyslexia can influence almost every aspect of daily lives – from how we organize and manage our time to how we browse online.

The most common problems people with dyslexia face are:

• Difficulty understanding written text.
• Communication problems with peers and colleagues.
• Difficult orientation in the online environment.
• Poor time-keeping and organizational skills.

These may seem easy for people without learning difficulties to organize and resolve, but for adults with dyslexia they can severely impact day-to-day life.

One of the key ways to be more dyslexia inclusive if you are a website owner or a business, based online, is to incorporate dyslexia friendly fonts.

What Are Dyslexia Fonts?

The easiest explanation is that fonts for dyslexia are a special type of typography aimed at making reading easy.

Research shows however that dyslexia is not a visual problem but rather a language problem - confusing the correlations between different sounds and letters. There are a lot of fonts out there that boast being dyslexic friendly, but there is no real research to support that.

Typography is always key when we upload content online. Better fonts help with the categorization of information when reading, easier navigation, etc. So, using a font that is dyslexia friendly can positively impact all users, not only the ones who are struggling.

Dyslexia fonts have some key differences from normal fonts. They use thicker lines in parts of the letter to give them weight, for example. Letters that look alike – b, d and p – for example, have tails and sticks with different lengths. Letter spacing is also bigger than in regular fonts, so is the spacing between the text lines.

The way they work is by increasing the readability of written content.

Although there is no research to support that specially designed dyslexia fonts make reading easier, some dyslexics say that they help with the speed of reading and understanding of the text.

Best Fonts for Dyslexia

Let’s start off this part by saying that choosing a dyslexia friendly font will not “cure” dyslexia. Different accessibility standards available make it easier for users with learning disabilities to understand written content and choosing the right font is just one more way of making things easier.

There are types of fonts that are proven to be easier to read. Let’s have a look at them.

Sans Serif

In typography, sans serif fonts are the ones that don’t have extending features on the end of letters. They have less strokes on individual letters, making them easier to view and understand. During the rise of newspapers sans serif fonts were used to highlight a word, because they have simpler looking forms and blacker type color.

The most widely used and famous sans serif fonts are Helvetica, Calibri, Grotesque, Ariel, Open Sans. The widely hated font Comic Sans is also suitable for people with dyslexia.

The most widely used among them by far is Helvetica. It is the font of choice for major companies such as Microsoft, Toyota, Lufthansa, BMW and many others. Helvetica is also the preferable font for most government organizations around the world like in the U.S., the European Union, New York City and Madrid Metro. It is also the style of choice for NASA.

One other very suitable accessible font is Century Gothic. It’s in the category of sans serif fonts, but it’s more geometric when compared to Helvetica, for example.

Non-Italic, Non-Oblique

Most modern-day fonts have different options – italic, semi-italic, bold, semi-bold, oblique, etc. When choosing a dyslexia friendly font you should keep in mind that all fonts who imitate handwriting are a bad choice.

Italic and cursive fonts can be hard to read even for people without dyslexia. Those types of fonts usually have more “decorations” on the individual letters, making it hard to distinguish them from one another.

Oblique fonts are also a bad choice. You can recognize them by the slight tilt of the letters to the right. Instead, opt for non-oblique fonts with simple looking letters.

Monospace

A monospace font is a font in which all the letters have the same width horizontally. That means that visually individual characters are easier to distinguish. They look the same size when compared to normal fonts that have proportional typography.

Monospaced fonts are widely used today, but they are most commonly found on typewriters and computer code.

Some of the more famous monospaced fonts are Anonymous Pro, Courier and Ubuntu Mono.

So, considering all of the above specifications and different types of fonts, here is a list of the best fonts for people with dyslexia:

• Arial;
• Courier;
• Helvetica;
• Verdana;
• Calibri;
• Trebuchet;
• Open Sans;
• Comic Sans;
• Tahoma;
• Century Gothic.

When designing your website or online blog, you should consider using one of the above fonts. They are so widely used and are available on almost every computer as a default font.

It’s important to keep in mind that text alignment is also crucial for the readability of a text from people with dyslexia. All written content should follow the logic of being right aligned (or left, depending on your language system). If letters are aligned in a different way, for example evenly on a web page so that there are different sizes of spaces between them, then it’s harder to read.

Which Fonts to Avoid?

Considering all that we have said by now, the fonts to avoid when designing a website to be dyslexia friendly, are the serif fonts.

In typography, a serif is the name of the fine lines and strokes on the ends of each letter. Their origin can be found in the first Greek writing in stone and after that in the Latin alphabet. Old-style fonts such as Typewriter and Times New Roman, although still widely used, are not suitable for people with dyslexia.

Fonts with different letter spacing are also not a good choice.

As we already said, handwritten and cursive fonts also have to be avoided, because there are often no clear spaces between the letters, which makes the reading harder.

Conclusion

Dyslexia is a type of learning disorder that affects millions of people around the world. Depending on the severity, dyslexia can severely impact the life of different individuals, leading to depression, anxiety and fears of rejection from society.

When designing a website that is dyslexia friendly, one of the key elements is the font. Although dyslexia is not a visual problem, using simpler fonts can benefit the struggling users to better understand written content.

There’s a wide variety of fonts, suitable for people with learning disorders. The most suitable ones for people with dyslexia are sans serif fonts, monospaced fonts and non-italic and non-oblique fonts.