Christian Boer always struggled with reading. When confronted with a page of text, the letters would twist and jumble together into an incomprehensible mess.
It was not until his mother overheard a conversation her husband was having with another teacher about dyslexia that she realised why her son might be having so much trouble.
“In class I would think of excuses about why I was struggling – I was tired or it just wasn’t my day,” says Boer. “But when everyone else would be finished and I had only made my way through half a page, I began to doubt myself. You start to think, ‘am I stupid?’
“Then my mother heard this remedial teacher explaining to my dad about dyslexia and she asked her to test me.”
Boer was six when he was diagnosed with dyslexia. Despite the extra help he received at school, he still struggled with long pages of typed text. Years later, while studying art at HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht, Holland, he decided to do something about his problem: he designed his own typeface.
Dyslexie is a font that aims to overcome some of the problems that people with dyslexia can have when reading. Due to the way their brains process visual information, they will often subconsciously switch, rotate and mirror letters, making it harder to recognise the characters.
It is thought that their brains start treating two-dimensional letters as three-dimensional objects that can be freely manipulated.
When this happens, the letter “b” can look like a “d”… or a “p” or a “q”. It is easy to see why this can quickly become confusing.
“Traditionally in typeface design, there are ‘rules’ that say it is best to make the letters as uniform as possible,” says Boer, now 36. “If you make the arch of an “h” the same as an “n”, it produces a typeface that is clean and quiet for ordinary readers. For me, these letters become three dimensional so you can turn them around and they begin to look alike. What I wanted to do was to slap these 3D letters flat.”
Instead of keeping the letters a uniform size, some have longer “sticks” that help to make them stand out more in words
He set about finding ways that would make it easier to distinguish different letters from each other. One key change was to make the letters bottom heavy, so they are bolder at the base than at the top.
“It is like fixing a brick onto a bicycle wheel,” he explains. “If you turn the wheel, the brick will always fall to the bottom. With the letters, if you turn them upside down, they look unnatural as the heavy side should be on the bottom.”
Unlike many traditional typefaces, the Dyslexie font is strongly asymmetric. Instead of keeping the letters a uniform size, some have longer “sticks” that help to make them stand out more in words. Similarly, letters that look alike, such as “v”, “w” and “y”, vary in their height when they are typed.
The shapes of the letters are also asymmetric, with the top of a “b” being narrower than the top of a “d”, making them easier to distinguish.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171204-the-typeface-that-helps-dyslexics-read
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