Read Regular

6 Comments

A European designer, Natascha French, has designed a new typeface called Read Regular to make text easier to read for dyslexic people.

It looks like a pretty normal sans-serif typeface at first glance, but the background page provides information on what's different about it. For example, each letter has a unique shape; b and d are not exact mirror images of each other. The regularity of shapes that's usually a characteristic of a good typeface is, I assume, a disadvantage when a reader might easily confuse exact mirror images, so the designer's added slight variations to each letter.

Pretty cool. Dyslexic people can presumably acquire the typeface (though I'm not quite sure how to do that) and use it on their computers, for reading web pages and such—though as a page on dyslexia at that site reminds me, big blocks of text may still be a problem.

6 Responses to “Read Regular”

  1. bethlet

    This is so cool — thanks for posting this. As a dyslexic, I am thrilled that someone thought of this!

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  2. David Moles

    The two most jarring things, I think, are the number 2 and the capital Q. Other than that, I think it’s surprising how much unity they manage to acheive despite the small variations in shape.

    The page on dyslexia is an interesting illustration of what they’re trying to avoid — though I think the “wash-out effect” and the “river effect” don’t have as much to do with the typeface as the “swirl effect” apparently does.

    I wonder how much could be done just by increasing the amount of white space on the page — wider margins, more leading, etc.

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  3. Jed

    Yeah, I suspect that more whitespace (up to a point) would help a great deal. One of the variant typefaces even adds a small amount of extra space around each letter.

    I suspect that some fonts are more pront to wash-out effect than others; some fonts have some very thin lines. But I’m talking through my hat here.

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  4. David Moles

    The “river effect” is an interesting one — something I’d heard about before, though I don’t remember if it was called that. It’s something that’s fairly straightforward for a human to fix on an old-fashioned letterpress by varying the spacing, but I wonder how (or if) it’s dealt with in digital composition.

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  5. Veerle Van den Broelck

    Where can we buy this typeface?

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  6. Jed

    I don’t have anything to do with the typeface; I was just linking to it. I recommend following my link and then going to the contact page for information on how to contact the designer. (But that page–which says “watch this space for full details of when it will be available and the cost”–hasn’t been updated in about three years, so I don’t know if the typeface was ever made available for sale.)

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