I appreciate that an expert institution designed a font for low vision readers with actual research. Every time I run an app that has OpenDyslexic as a font choice I die a little inside. It's the worst sort of "pretend to be helping" option. It actually is worse for reading than ordinary fonts. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5629233/
I guess I’m the rare duckling who would report preferring OpenDyslexic! IMO it scans better, and is excellent when combined with beeline reader.
When I was at the ages of the sample, my lexile scores were through the roof, compared to the sample here which has poor to middling reading ability (typical for dyslexia) — i do not have dyslexia but still feels like OpenDyslexic makes it easier to read.
The data in the study does not support your conclusion that it “actually is worse”, unless i missed something in my interpretation? It seems to be a wash.
> “OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading.”
Yikes, not a strong design IMO. I know very little about dyslexia, but reading individual words as a small child doesn’t seem like a comprehensive way to measure “how dyslexic people read.”
Presumably the primary envisioned use-case for a specialized typeface like this is paragraphs of text, read by people who have the language skills to ”think in paragraphs,” even if the visual processing is a challenge.
This is all armchair, I’d welcome correction or nuance.
