font for students with dyslexia and other learning disabilit

A common misconception. “Simple” fonts, the so-called “Gothic” or sans-serif typefaces such as Arial, are actually harder because they lack some of the detail that helps distinguish different letters. For example, I (capital i) and l (lower-case L) are indistinguishable in these fonts, and that is very difficult for some of my students.

I read a long time ago a study that concluded that the most readable fonts are Roman or serif faces with no special decorative forms; the face called “Century Schoolbook” is very good (There is a reason it was used in schoolbooks.)

Some ultra-beginner books also use a typeface similar to children’s manuscript printing, and **if** you get a good simple one, this can be good. Avoid cutesie things with reversed letter or uneven heights or mixtures of capital and lower-case - these are faults you wanmt to avoid, not teach.

And always use lower-case, never all caps. Lower-case **is** more readable. Also books are 95% or more lower-case, so learning to read all caps means you’ll have to learn to read all over again when you get your first book, a huge waste of energy.

Thank you for pointing this out. I’ve had this discussion with my son’s teacher that the sans serif face she was using on spelling lists, vocabulary list, writing practice papers, etc. were confusing my son. We battled this every night on homework, I would have to rewrite some things so that he could more easily recognize the letters.

Her response was, well, that’s the way the master copies are given to me. She just didn’t get it.

I like the modern primary font. It looks a lot like most printing taught in school. It has the little tail on the a, and the curve of the l and the i.
nan

In general this can be good.

In particular, I’ve had real trouble with some students. A certain kind of student focuses with a bear-trap grip on the details and ignores the big picture, and will fight to the death to maintain his world view. I had one student who focused on the little curve at the end of the lower-case a and made it a whole line high, while the main part of the a, the leading circle, shrunk to a tiny little decoration at the side. It looked sort of like a fishhook and nothing like an a. He also became very upset when I tried to get him to write differently; he knew the “right” way to do it.

Similarly some students can focus too much on the curl of the i and the l and lose the signals that make these letters distinguishable.

I’ve had most luck with presenting basic printing in the most stripped-down style possible, no serifs and no curves; and also in a semi-cursive style with as few pen lifts as possible — for example, the lower case a is made as a counterclockwise circle with a slide up to the middle line and then a downline, no pen lift, *not* the two-piece difficult-to-line-up “ball and stick” form.

Just a point on the teacher’s side — she is given a curriculum to use, and those handouts are probably copies from master copies provided by the school board. In some cases teachers have some choice what materials to order, but almost never in the presentation of those materials; you take the font you get. Even my favourite phonics workbooks have a very poor sans serif font. In other cases the materials are mandated by the board and she must use them; they are essentially textbooks in page-by-page form. Whether she ordered them or not, the teacher doesn’t type and print 99% of the things she hands out — there could never be time. So no, she doesn’t understand what you’re asking — are you asking her to sit down and spend two hours every night re-typing every single thing she hands to your child so it can be in your preferred font? It is nice to have individualized help, bit there are limits on time.

Changing the font of a text is a very simple process with a scanner and an OCR program, which most scanners come with as part of the software. Just scan the page to Word, highlight, and change it to a different font—five minutes top.

But, I would have to agree with Victoria. Teachers have enough to worry about and keep them busy. Changing the font of a worksheet that he did not produce might take hours, if he does not have a scanner.

Peter

I was using a scanner, top-notch and brand-new, for a blind NASA engineer last year. He was re-training by going to law school, and I was helping him scan some very dense law texts. Evedn with brand-new untouched books and the best equipment NASA could buy, there were a LOT of errors that required hand correction. Many words came out misspelled as the scanner couldn’t distinguish some letters either. Anything in tabular format was trashed. Pages with columnnar variation were messy. Considering that worksheets tend to have all sorts of specail formatting and often special symbols, at the present level of technology scanning and correcting would take as much time as or more than re-typing the whole thing.

I just purchased a new scanner. I have had almost no problem with it at all. It recognizes almost every word when translated to word. I have not scanned to many charts, but I did scanner a coupel maps to Adobe Acrobat, and there was not problem with the maps nor the names of the cities on the map.

Peter Martin