Dyslexia Fonts: Do They Help? The Studies

No. In the published studies, purpose-made dyslexia fonts did not help children with dyslexia read faster or more accurately than ordinary typefaces such as Arial. A font changes how letters look, and dyslexia is not a difficulty with how letters look.

What can make a page more comfortable is plainer than a special font: bigger text, more space, shorter lines. This guide sets out what the studies tested, which settings are worth changing on a school device, and where fonts sit beside the teaching that dyslexia treatment relies on.

What did the studies of dyslexia fonts find?

The studies found no reading benefit from the letter shapes of a dyslexia font. Four peer-reviewed studies tested dyslexia fonts, including the two best known, Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic, against everyday typefaces, and none found that the special letter shapes improved speed or accuracy.

Study	Who took part	What was compared	What it found
Kuster and colleagues, 2018	170 children with dyslexia, then a second group of 102 children with dyslexia and 45 without	Dyslexie against Arial (and Times New Roman in the second group)	No difference in reading speed or accuracy in either group
Wery and Diliberto, 2017	12 students with dyslexia aged 9 to 12	OpenDyslexic against Arial and Times New Roman	No improvement for any student or for the group
Marinus and colleagues, 2016	39 children who were behind in reading	Dyslexie against Arial, with and without matched spacing	About 7% more words a minute in Dyslexie, which disappeared once Arial was given the same spacing
Galliussi and colleagues, 2020	64 children with dyslexia and 64 without, aged about 12	A dyslexia-friendly letter shape against a standard one, at different spacings	The letter shape made no difference to speed or accuracy

Children did not prefer the special fonts either. In the 2018 study about one child in nine chose Dyslexie as the font they liked best, and Arial was the most popular choice. In the 2017 study no student said they preferred OpenDyslexic.

The 2018 authors wrote that Dyslexie “neither benefits nor impedes” reading. That is a fair summary of the whole field: these fonts do little harm, and they have not been shown to help.

Why would a dyslexia font not help?

A dyslexia font does not help because dyslexia is a difficulty with language, not with eyesight. Dyslexia fonts were designed on the idea that letters flip, swap or blur for a dyslexic reader, so the letters are given heavier bottoms, a slight slant and sticks and tails of different lengths.

The idea does not match what dyslexia is. A child with dyslexia finds it hard to hear the separate sounds inside a spoken word and to tie those sounds to letters, and that makes working out a printed word slow and effortful. They see the letters as clearly as any other child. Reshaping the letters leaves the hard part untouched.

Many young children mix up b and d while they are learning which way letters face, whether or not they have dyslexia. It is not the core of the difficulty.

The same reasoning applies to tinted lenses and coloured sheets, which the guide to coloured overlays and dyslexia glasses covers.

Does wider letter spacing help a dyslexic reader?

Wider spacing may help some children a little, and the evidence is mixed. It is the one part of a dyslexia font with any research behind it, because these fonts also set letters and words further apart.

The 2016 study found that spacing, not letter shape, explained the small gain it measured. A 2012 study of 74 Italian and French children with dyslexia found they made fewer errors and read faster when the letters were spaced widely.

The 2020 study did not repeat that result. Widening the gaps between letters without also widening the gaps between words slowed children slightly, and the authors judged most of the spacing effects too small to matter in practice.

For a parent, spacing costs nothing to try and any word processor can do it. If your child says a more open page is easier to read, keep it. If they notice no difference, nothing has been lost.

What is the best font for dyslexia?

There is no best font for dyslexia, and no typeface has earned the label of a dyslexia friendly font. A plain, familiar, evenly spaced typeface such as Arial, Verdana or Calibri is a sound choice, and the settings around the font matter more than the font.

These settings come from the guidance Dyslexia Scotland publishes for dyslexia-friendly documents. They make text easier on the eye for any reader.

Setting	What to try	Why it helps
Typeface	A plain, evenly spaced one your child already knows	Decorative, slanted and tightly packed letters crowd together
Text size	12 point or larger on paper, and larger again on a screen if your child prefers it	Small text is harder work for a slow, careful reader
Line spacing	About one and a half lines	It is easier to keep your place and find the next line
Line length	Roughly 50 to 75 characters, or 11 to 15 words	A long line is easy to lose on the way back to the left margin
Alignment	Left aligned, with an uneven right edge	Fully justified text stretches the gaps between words unevenly
Background	Off white or cream, on matte rather than glossy paper	Some readers find it less glaring; this is comfort, not a reading gain

If your child likes a dyslexia font, there is no reason to take it away. Comfort and choice count for something, especially for a child who has started to avoid reading. Tell them the truth about it, though: the font is a preference, the same as a favourite pen.

How do I change the text settings on a school device?

Most school devices can make text larger and more widely spaced without installing anything. The three places a child reads most often each have a built-in tool.

Word documents. Open the View menu and choose Immersive Reader. It can widen the text spacing, narrow the column so that lines are shorter, change the page colour and read the text aloud.
Web pages in the Chrome browser, including on a Chromebook. Right-click the page and choose “Open in reading mode”. The side panel lets your child change the font, the text size, the line height, the letter spacing and the colour theme, and it can read the page aloud.
An iPad. In Settings, open Accessibility, then Display & Text Size. Larger Text and Bold Text change the text across the device.

A school-managed device may have some settings locked. If so, ask the class teacher to have them switched on. A larger text size or a reading mode is a small change for a school to make, and the guide to dyslexia at school covers how to ask for adjustments like it.

Reading aloud is the feature in that list most likely to matter. A child who listens to a text while following the words can keep up with the content of a lesson while their reading is still catching up. The guide to assistive technology goes through text to speech and the other tools.

Is a dyslexia font a treatment for dyslexia?

No. A font is not a treatment for dyslexia and it does not teach a child to read. At most it makes a page a little more comfortable to look at.

What changes reading is teaching. A child with dyslexia needs to be taught, explicitly and in a planned order, how the sounds of spoken words map onto letters. Then they need a great deal of practice reading and spelling words with those patterns. That approach is called structured literacy.

The researchers who tested OpenDyslexic raised one caution worth passing on. A child who has already struggled, is told that a special font will help and then reads no better in it, has one more experience of failure, and that can wear down their confidence further. Set the font up as a comfort setting and nothing more, and that disappointment does not arise.

The page on dyslexia treatment sets out what the evidence supports and what it does not.