Thanks, Clive,
That is so astonishingly cool!
I'm not dyslexic, nor am I aware of having known one, but this little scrap of information sort of helps illuminate the manifest difficulties someone with the condition has to deal with.
Kind of like reading "Motherless Brooklyn" by Jonathan Lethem -- while not the final word on the condition by any means -- at least gives you a glimpse of what its like from inside -- a few baby steps in someone else's moccasins, as it were.
And that can't help but be good for people's perspective...

peace,

bud

By a totally weird coincidence, I just read Motherless Brooklyn this weekend for the first time! And you're right -- it's a superb glimpse into the daily experience of having Tourette's. I wonder how much research Lethem must have done to capture that so well.

I've been watching the development of this project for a while... partly because Natascha Frensch is producing it as part of a research course I'm interested in doing myself, but mostly because legibility in type design is something I feel I know a fair bit about, and work on every day.

Read is a lovely typeface - a beautiful piece of work. And Natascha's research into Dyslexia seems thorough.

What I don't understand though, is why this typeface is pitched as an aid for dyslexic readers - it doesn't do anything which isn't accepted practice for basic legibility.

It's a typeface borne out of every possible attempt to make itself clear and easy to read. It's a great piece of work, it's very successful. But it's not specifically anything to do with the problems faced by dyslexics, and I'm still having trouble seeing why it's targeted that way.

I can't shake the nagging feeling that Natascha set out to study dyslexia and how typographers could help, but ended up simply applying the basic tenets of legibility and readability and not adding anything new.

Still, it's a triumph. I'm just concerned that it may give false hope because of the way it's being marketed.

That's really, really interesting. I didn't know enough about typography to figure out whether she'd actually done something specifically useful to dyslexics. But you're right; it could well be that she started off with those intentions, and merely produced a very good -- but conventional -- font. It's certainly good-looking, though.

Are there any tricks of visual presentation that are known to aid dyslexics in reading comprehension? I wonder.

To the best of my knowledge, all you can do is make the type as clean and clear as possible.

Which is what she's done, no doubt about that.

The easier it is to read for everybody, the better for dyslexics too.

Other things can help - when setting the text, getting your spacing between lines right and that sort of thing - making sure the column width isn't too much, to aid the eye in jumping to the next line's beginning...

All these things are basic concepts for legibility though.

Here's an interesting one - at the University of Reading (That's Reading the city, not the verb), research was done a year or two ago into how typographers can help young children who are learning to read. There's nothing conclusive, but it seems that there's no advantage gained between using serif or sans-serif type, but children do often find it helps for the letters to be joined-up. That directly contradicts most modern thought on legibility for adults.

No way! That's incredibly cool. If you ever find a link to that study, I'd love to post it.

I wonder if it's because the joined script "looks" more like "adult" handwriting? The mind boggles.

Here you go... I had it bookmarked at work.

http://www.textmatters.com/kidstype/

Excellent -- thanks!

Nice site. thx.