Free Font Helps People With Dyslexia

Thornburg writes "There is a free font available which has been designed to make it easier for people with dyslexia to read. DailyTech has a piece which pulls together a BBC interview and blog postings by the designer, Abelardo Gonzalez, who received a C&D letter from another font designer who charges $69 for his dyslexia related font."

Re:Uhhh well, shit.

[alvinrod]

Interesting. I think that this font also makes it easier for me to read more quickly, but I wouldn't consider myself dyslexic as I've never felt as though I've had difficulties reading almost any font and read quite frequently. Maybe I'm just thinking that I can read that font more quickly, but for some reason it does seem easier to read. Perhaps it's something that's true for people in general. I'd be curious to see if there have been any studies to determine if this font also improves reading speed for people who haven't been diagnosed or probably wouldn't be diagnosed as dyslexic. All that aside, stuff like this is really awesome. Even though a lot of people like to say or think that the world is going to shit, it's also getting better in a lot of ways for a lot of people.

Re:Uhhh well, shit.

[DigMarx]

I tend to read by seeing an entire line at a time. The page you referenced sort of forced me to read left to right, parsing as I go. I'm not dyslexic either, but I can see how the font may help people by encouraging a "normal" cadence.

Well, it doesn't work...

[Gordonjcp]

I'm pretty severely dyslexic, and I just plain cannot read his website in that font. The weird shading from top to bottom makes it look like it's been printed on a daisywheel with the platen out of alignment.

It's so hard to read I had to turn off the stylesheet to make my way through the page.

Re:US: fonts not protected / font files are

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it means that the vector description of the scalable glyphs is software. There is some justification to that, as vector drawings consist of paths that are made up of very basic instructions: start here, go there in a straight line, curve to that there using these two control points, end here.

Re:US: fonts not protected / font files are

[dgatwood]

As I understand it, basically, yes, so long as all you start with is the shape of the font at some size and not the specific set of points that define the lines and curves. You'll also have to choose all the kerning, tracking, and leading values, though, so it isn't quite as trivial as you seem to be suggesting. That said, some tools such as Fontographer can do a halfway decent job of guessing those values....

Control freakery stopping a good thing.

[Stu101]

Because of the control freakery that Amazon "needs" you can't actually read a book in it. I think Amazon and Google should get the support on this font super quick.

I am a big user of Amazon e-books and not having the ability to change the fonts kind of defeats a major selling point over old paper books. If Amazon started doing this I suspect they would be repaid several dozen times over with people who appreciate it.

I think users should be allowed to choose their own font. So what if it looks totally crap. Its personal preference and it doesn't affect anyone else. Let the "Marketing" droids go swivel.

BTW,I am a bit pissed because I never knew my reading was difficult until I used this font. It's kind of a realisation! And someone is trying to stop me being able to do things better.

I also understand that Amazon etc are working on licencing it, but if we could change our own font, we wouldn't have the issue.