Meet Christian Boer, a Dutch graphic designer who’s created a new font to assist people, like himself, suffering with dyslexia.
His typeface “Dyslexie” is the first of its type and was developed as part of his final thesis project when he was studying at the Utrecht Art Academy in the Netherlands. The new typeface has been designed to help dyslexic people to read by varying the shapes of the letters more, making it harder to confuse similarly shaped letters like “b” and “d,” for example.
“Traditional fonts are designed solely from an aesthetic point of view, which means they often have characteristics that make characters difficult to recognise for people with dyslexia,” he says. “Oftentimes, the letters of a word are confused, turned around or jumbled up because they look too similar.”
And the results speak for themselves. Watch the video below then read on to find out how this has already helped adults and kids alike!
Dyslexie’s already proven to be making a positive difference, including a reduction in flipping and mirroring of letters plus increased ease in reading for those with dyslexia. Independent studies at the University of Twente in Amsterdam found that nearly 75% of the students surveyed reported making less reading mistakes when taking a test written in the font, according to “Dyslexie’s” 2012 research. Imagine the impact that will have on your child’s school success!
The outcome among children using the font learned that they experience reading in the font Dyslexia as very positive. More than three quarters of the children made fewer errors while reading when they got a text in the font Dyslexia.
The children said that they could read faster. Something that is also confirmed by more than three quarters of the parents.
