Dedicated to make reading easy

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Back when he was in college, Abelardo Gonzalez used different methods to make reading his study material easier: Using different coloured pens to write, highlighting with markers. Then Gonzalez came across a dyslexic-friendly font, and found that reading it was much easier than something printed in a regular font.

Gonzalez himself is not dyslexic, but realised that for people with the learning disability, there simply wasn’t much available in the way of what might make their reading experience easier.
“There were none that were available to the public,” he says. “Only a few publishers had access to them.”
So, in late 2011, began a quest to create a font that could help ordinary readers with dyslexia.
“I was encouraged in this endeavour by family and friends and I finally designed Open Dyslexic — a free, open source typeface that helps circumvent many of the problems that dyslexics typically face when confronted by a body of text,” says Gonzalez. Gonzalez, a solutions development analyst at Blue Cross Blue Shield in the US, explains how the typeface developed its unique characteristics. “We have unique shapes for letters that someone with dyslexia might easily confuse, such as an M and W or a d, p, q and b or letters and numbers, like l, i or 1,” Gonzalez says. Gonzalez adds that letters typed in Open Dyslexic have “heavy or weighted bottoms” that show readers what is the baseline and secure them on the page, especially useful as “letters tend to jump and spin on the page for someone suffering from dyslexia.”