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thekeri:

Christian Boer, a typographer at the firm Studiostudio, based in the Netherlands, has designed a special font for people with dyslexia. The font, called “Dyslexie,” uses specially shaped letters to exaggerate some of the differences between letters that dyslexics find hard to see.

How well does it work? A master’s thesis by Renske de Leeuw at the University of Twente shows that the font boosts accuracy, but not reading speed; although there are certain words that are now harder to read than before, the net effect is positive. What’s needed now, de Leeuw explains, is a more robust research program, testing specific changes to the letterforms to see which ones help dyslexics and which ones don’t. You can get a sense of some of the ways in which typography might help by looking at detailed images of the font here.

No. No. No. 

Let’s start at the beginning. Like at the beginning of this dumbass video, which states that people with dyslexia view letters in 3D. This assertion is patently false. I’m not even sure I understand what it means, though it reminds me of the time I saw an ad for HD sunglasses. 

There is nothing wrong (or 3D-enhanced) about the visual perceptive system of a person with dyslexia. People with dyslexia play sports, watch movies, drive cars. Some wear glasses, some don’t. Dyslexia is not a visual-perceptive problem. It is a language problem. Unfortunately, people who don’t know much about language - like the typographer who created this new dyslexia-solving font- don’t understand this.

The author of this paper and creator of the font, bases his work on the magnocellular deficit theory. The magnocellular deficit theory states that people with dyslexia have a visual-perception impairment. The impairment reduces contrast sensitivity and therefore makes it hard to track objects in space (e.g., words on a page during reading). Certainly there are people who have a magnocellular deficit (and other types of visual impairments) that would make reading difficult. However, the evidence that people with dyslexia have this kind of deficit is incredibly sparse (see Skottun, 1999 for a review).

There are proven physiological differences in the brains of dyslexic and typical readers but visual perception is not one of them. One study (Vellutino, 1975) examined English-speaking children with dyslexia. The children were asked to transcribe unfamiliar Hebrew characters. The children had no difficulty with the task. Although the symbols were “letters” they had no linguistic value to the children. This tells us that children with dyslexia have no problem with interpreting or rotating abstract symbols. It’s only when those symbols are associated with language that a problem arises. 

 Dyslexia is a condition where there is a weak association between the form of the letter (grapheme) and its corresponding sound (phoneme). Yes, people with dyslexia often confuse similarly shaped letters (e.g., b/d/q/p), but they have other problems as well. I worked with a boy with dyslexia for over a year. He very often confused “wh” and “th” (e.g., “when”/”then”). Obviously, “wh” and “th” look nothing alike. What was happening was a confusion between the symbols and the sounds they make. The boy knew that the two letters together made a single sound, either /w/ or /ch/- a good first step. He just wasn’t sure which sound was which, because he had trouble creating a link between the graphemes and the phonemes. 

 This author’s new font purports to improve reading accuracy by making letters more dissimilar. By that logic, we could simply teach children with dyslexia to only use capital letters or cursive, which tend to be more different. But, since dyslexia is not simply a problem of visual discrimination, this tactic doesn’t work. Children with dyslexia have trouble with capital letters and cursive, too! (Again, because they have a poor association between the symbol and the sound). Unfortunately, the rest of the world typically does not use crazy fonts, cursive, or capslock. How functional is a reading treatment if it only works when you use a single font? People with dyslexia need to learn the sound-symbol association regardless of font.

Lastly, this author’s research shows that the new “dyslexie” font did not enable children to read faster than a normal font. This is a huge problem. Almost all people with dyslexia read painfully slowly. We say that they are nonfluent readers. Imagine reading each word in a sentence at a very slow pace, taking time to sound each word out, re-reading words many times over. Try it. It…. macks. makes com..com…comp..pre..hen. comprehensh.comprehension. hear possible. no, wait, nearly improssible. Impossible. Get it? The slowed rate of dyslexic reading puts an enormous strain on working memory. If you can’t read fast enough to remember a sentence from start to finish, you will not understand the meaning of the sentence, let alone a longer passage.

Everything about this is bad, from the science the theory is based upon to its potential for therapeutic implementation. What helps children with dyslexia is systematic, explicit, multisensory phonics instruction. Not papyrus and comic sans.   

(Source: abbyjean)