There is a growing field of different fonts to help with all sorts of situations, one of the most interesting is to help people with specific reading problems.  Mostly these fonts are being developed as open source and are available on a ’free to use’ basis online.

One of the most interesting is that of the OpenDyslexic font which is designed to help people with dyslexia use the web and read online content more easily.

You can see from the illustration that the characters are given a lot more weight towards the bottom of the characters.  This is supposed to help them flipping around and switching in the minds of dyslexic readers whilst they read.  It’s beginning to be integrated into various formats including a word processor, an ebook reader and is also being widely used in some educational establishments.

The project is the brainchild of Abelardo Gonzalez whod designs mobile apps in New Hampshire.  They were released onto the web in an open sourced format at the end of last year, so their progress is quite encouraging.  The development was initially advertised using online advertising such as PPC and banner ads.

There are reports of the font being installed onto Android devices and also through the jailbreak community who have adapted it to work on Apples iOS devices.  This is encouraging news as many people use the iPad and other apps extensively to improve their reading or access education resources such as the BBC Iplayer – here’s an example.

More specialist schools and organisations have been in touch with Mr Gonzalez, so hopefully  this useful font will find it’s wy into a lot more applications and sites over the coming years.  It’s actually quite easy to read for anyone though, with it’s bold bottom heavy typeface.