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Episode: 1770
Title: HPR1770: The OpenDyslexic Font
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1770/hpr1770.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:04:58
---
This is HPR episode 1,770 entitled The Open Dislexic Font and in part of the series Accessibility.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 18 minutes long.
The summary is introduction to The Open Dislexic Font.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Hey folks, John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana back with another episode for Hacker Public Radio.
This is another in the series on Accessibility.
Today I'm going to talk about The Open Dislexic Font.
This is something that I heard about a couple of years ago.
I wish I could remember exactly in what context I heard about this.
I don't remember whether I was researching dyslexia and optimal formatting for things for a student of mine or what.
But anyway, somewhere along the line I came across the Open Dislexic Font.
The Open Dislexic Font is a font that is optimized for people with dyslexia.
If you go to OpenDislexic.org you can see that their entire site is done using this font.
The reason it is supposed to work for dyslexic people is that it is bottom heavy.
Every character is heavier at the bottom than it is at the top.
This is supposed to help keep the numbers and letters from moving around.
It keeps them anchored.
It looks a little funny for those of us who are not dyslexic.
But I had first-hand experience with students who have looked at it and immediately said,
yeah, this is easier for me to read.
Ever since I heard about this font I've been interested in how effective it is
and whether it's something that could be used widely to help people who struggle with dyslexia.
This is not the first time the topic has come up on hacker public radio incidentally.
I did a search to make sure that no one had done a show about this topic before.
There has not been a show dedicated to it, but we did talk about it during one of the 2013 New Year's episodes.
Episode 1418.
I took a little chunk out of the notes here.
It says that John Colp talks about the open dyslexic font.
The next line says that sound chaser installs open dyslexic extension in chromium.
Then it says, Poki looks at the open dyslexic website and is able to read the page very quickly for Poki anyway.
It goes ahead and tries to install the font.
I remember this conversation and that no one who was in the chat room at the moment had ever heard of it.
Poki, I remember him saying that, yeah, I can't remember ever being able to read something as easily as this.
I've not really heard any follow-up from him, but I've had similar stories from some of my students with dyslexia.
I teach at a university with about 17,000 students and I have a couple of classes that are large and so pretty much every semester I get students who are dyslexic.
And dyslexia takes many forms and this font is not going to help everybody, but it's the kind of thing that I think it's good at least to know about so that you can see whether it helps you or not.
So there's some really easy stuff you can do to use open dyslexic font if it turns out that it helps you.
The best way to check on this is just to go to their website and read a little bit and see if the font makes any difference.
If it does, then you can do a couple of things right away that will help you or overall experience on the web.
One of them is to install a browser extension.
There are extensions both for Chrome and for Firefox that will turn every page you visit into a page that uses open dyslexic font.
And I will have links to those in the show notes.
You can also install the font on your desktop.
If you are on Windows or Mac, then you would probably have to install it from the open dyslexic.org website.
Since these are open fonts, they are available in the repositories of major Linux distributions and I have links in the show notes, actually not links, but just package names for Debian and Ubuntu for Fedora and for Arch.
I put the package names that you would run whatever command it is that installs a package followed by this package name and it will install this as a system font for you.
And once you have it as a system font, you can easily use it in your word processors or other things.
I've used it in LibreOffice and it's very easy to use there. It simply appears in your list of available fonts when you go to change the font.
I've also used it successfully in Lottec, although this is not quite as easy.
Lottec has a different kind of system for finding fonts and I remember struggling a little bit.
It seems like I worked for an hour or two one day to make this font available to Lottec when it compiles my code.
But it is possible and the way I use it on the desktop is that when I have a student who I know is dyslexic and who is helped by this font, I will print out materials such as exams.
If I'm giving an exam and this student says it helps him or her read the exam easier with this font, then I will print that student's exam out using this font.
And then I normally also will do some other basic reformatting that helps people with dyslexia.
For example, on multiple choice questions, it's better for them if your answers A, B, C, D and E do not run across the page like I normally like to do.
I like to do it that way because it takes so much less paper.
They prefer to have the answers stacked up one on top of another and so I will reformat the test to do it that way.
And I actually have some tricks that make it so it only takes me a few keystrokes to make the entire test reformat.
Maybe that's a topic for another episode.
Where was it going? Oh yeah, so I will print out their test materials in a slightly different format and with this font.
And it's really helped some people because they say that one of the biggest difficulties for them in taking tests was the stress that comes from just not being able to read something properly.
They're already in a stressful situation just taking a test and then having the letters swimming around and turning upside down makes it even worse.
So by using this font, I've been able to help some people just focus on the content of the text, the test and not worry about actually being able to read it.
So that's a big help.
When I make up a test using Latek, like I did for the test I'm giving this afternoon.
I actually inserted a little toggle. Latek has this thing called a toggle where you can toggle true or toggle false.
And I have a toggle set up for dyslexic or not dyslexic.
And when the dyslexic toggle is set to true, then it applies a whole different set of styling rules than it does if I have it set the other way.
And so if I'm writing a test in Latek, it really is the matter of commenting out one line and then uncommenting another and then recompiling and the test is completely reformatted.
So that's kind of cool.
So those are some easy ways you can start using the open dyslexic font.
Some more advanced things like if you are somebody who has to provide content to other people such as a web developer or an ebook editor like I am right now,
or somebody in a position where you're constantly giving information out to people.
And I do that every day too, being a professor.
Just try to be aware of the fact that some people might be benefited by this and take some steps to use it.
Web developers can use embedded web fonts and that way make the font available on their web pages.
For example, I have this font embedded on my web server and it's available to users as an alternate style sheet.
So on Firefox anyway, I'm not sure how to do this on Chrome.
But on Firefox, if you go to the View menu and then go down where it says Style and then go across to whatever sub menus there are,
one of your options is to remove all styling and on my website another option is to use the open dyslexic font.
And when you choose that, it'll change everything to that font.
Now I wish there a little bit more discoverable way to make this happen, but I have not tracked that down yet.
But again, if what you want is to be able to use that font while browsing the web, then the best thing really is to install one of those extensions.
Embedding this font in an e-book is something that I just figured out how to do in the last couple of days.
This is something that I've been wanting to figure out for quite a long time because a lot of my episodes have been either directly or indirectly about e-book formatting.
And I really love e-books and one of the great things about an e-book is the instant hackability that they have that for example PDF files do not have
in an e-book app or on a dedicated e-book reader. A user can instantly change the font that is being used for the whole book.
And that kind of hackability is what's so great about it.
And so being able to switch a regular book to use this font would be just awesome for somebody who suffers from dyslexia.
However, the kindle that I have does not allow a user to install his or her own fonts.
The older versions of the firmware used to allow this, but the newer version doesn't.
If you are able to get one of the older kinds of kindles, you can just include a basically an empty file that says use alt fonts and then put all of your fonts that you want to have available in this certain directory.
And then next time you try to change the font, those fonts will be available to you. Well, this doesn't work anymore.
And so you have to take other measures to be able to use the font.
And one of the things I did was to jailbreak my kindle to install an alternate e-book reader app in it.
And that works, but it's really not ideal. Most people are not going to be comfortable jailbreaking their devices.
As a hacker kind of person, this is like bread and butter. I mean, we love doing that kind of thing.
But your average user is not going to want to do that.
And so for my counterpoint books that I've been working on, once I figured out how to embed fonts, I did it for not only this one,
but for an old English font that I use for the dedication, because in the original paper copy of this book,
the dedication was done in this really fancy old English font. And it's, you know, it's not necessary really,
but it's kind of a nice touch if you can do that. And so I got the font embedding to work.
I added a line to my conversion options to embed whatever fonts are referenced in the book and now it works.
So I added a couple of more lines to my build script to generate from the source HTML file,
not only the AZW3 for Kindle and the EPUB for all other platforms, but also for each of those file formats,
a dyslexic edition that embeds the open dyslexic font and also changes a couple of the other styling options,
like it increases the line height a little bit to spread the text out a little bit.
And it also increases the space between the paragraphs. And these are both things that seem to help dyslexic readers.
And so if you go to my counterpoint page on my website now, you can see that there are open dyslexic options for each of those books.
And so I don't know, that's kind of cool. On the candle, you have to choose to use the publisher's font to be able to access it.
Let's see. Sometimes certain products will actually come with this font.
I bought an eBook app for the iPad that the university provided for me when I was testing compatibility of my book with all of these eBook apps that I could find.
One of the things I got was Marvin. It's a paid app. It costs $3.99, but it's really, really an excellent app.
And one of the things that's great about it is it comes with the open dyslexic font available to you.
The iPad itself does not. And it seems like it's kind of hard to install any other fonts on there.
But if you get Marvin, you can use the open dyslexic font. And Marvin's also just an awesome app for anybody who likes to hack things and for customizing.
Because you can essentially change any parameter you want in the eBook that you're reading from really basic things like the font.
But down to, you know, margin size, line height, space between paragraphs, the first line indent, header size, header font.
I mean, you can change everything and then save your settings as profiles. And it's great for people who like to really customize the books that they're reading.
So that's probably about all that I wanted to say about the open dyslexic font today. But the main thing is just to be aware that it's available if either you or someone you know is dyslexic and try it out.
You know, it's not going to help everybody. I mean, if you visit the open dyslexic.org website, they've got a link there to read what people are saying about it on Facebook.
And a bunch of the comments are from people who are saying, wow, this has really changed my life. Suddenly I can read things easily.
And thank you so much. And then other people say, I have no idea what people are talking about. This is actually making it harder for me to read.
So, I mean, it's definitely not for everybody. But it's a nice option to know about because it really might help somebody, you know, so spread the word. I guess that's the big message.
All right. Until next time, talk to you later.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.