As I get older I'm finding that some things are a bit harder to read. Glasses and increasing font size help, but I've started looking at using fonts that can be easier to read to help things along. I install Open Dyslexic and Atkinson Hyperlegible Font to my Ubuntu Linux laptops to help legibility. Both fonts are also available for Windows and Mac.

Way back, I had a colleague who said she was having some trouble reading longer documents because of her dyslexia. I suggested changing the font while she was doing the reading, editing and writing, and then change it back to the standard font when it was ready to go. For information about changing the Document Style of a Word processing document (specifically LibreOffice) check the page Using Accessible Fonts in LibreOffice

I can't remember if that was what triggered me to go looking for an alternate font, or if I had previously found the OpenDyslexic font to suggest.

And later I saw something about the Atkinson Hyperlegible and started using it for my Element chat (smaller screen with a higher resolution). I suggested it to one of my low vision colleagues to see if that would help them.

I use Libby and ReadEra as my ereaders on my Android tablet. Both of those have access to the OpenDyslexic font and I have set them to use it as the default font for books I am reading.

There is already plenty of documentation about the interwebs debating serif vs non-serif and light vs dark themes and how they can help or hinder legiblity. I don't really need to get into those discussions here.

OpenDyslexic Font

From the website https://opendyslexic.org:

OpenDyslexic is a typeface designed against some common symptoms of dyslexia. OpenDyslexic is free to use: The newest version of OpenDyslexic now uses the SIL-OFL license, giving you freedom to use it for personal use, business use, education, commercial, books, ebook readers, applications, websites, and any other project or purpose you need.

You can clearly see the different weights of the parts of the characters in the font. That is supposed to help the way people with dyslexia recognise characters and the words they make up. Certainly not going to say that this will work for all those with dyslexia, as how that affects people will be different. Worth giving it a go to see if it does make a difference to how the written word is comprehended.

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

From the website https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont:

Atkinson Hyperlegible font is named after Braille Institute founder, J. Robert Atkinson. What makes it different from traditional typography design is that it focuses on letterform distinction to increase character recognition, ultimately improving readability.

Rather than change the weighting of different parts of the characters as OpenDyslexic does, Atkinson Hyperlegible aims to provide better form to the characters to make them easier to differentiate, and therefore read and comprehend.

This website has been set up to use Atkinson Hyperlegible as it's font.

Installing the fonts in Ubuntu

Although one can install these fonts via the GUI applications, it is often easier to describe how to do things from the command line. <Ctrl><Alt><t> will get you to the command line (aka that black box to type things in).

OpenDyslexic

Because the OpenDyslexic package is part of the Ubuntu universe repository, installing the OpenDyslexic font should be as simple as running this command ..

sudo apt-get install fonts-opendyslexic

Atkinson Hyperlegible

The Atkinson Hyperlegible font it not currently part of a standard Ubuntu repository, so we have a few more things to do as part of making it available for our applications.

We'll create a directory to save our installs into and change into that directory ..

mkdir -p ~/Installs
cd ~/Installs

Download the zip file of the font and unzip it ..

wget https://brailleinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/atkinson-hyperlegible-font/Atkinson-Hyperlegible-Font-Print-and-Web-2020-0514.zip
unzip ./Atkinson-Hyperlegible-Font-Print-and-Web-2020-0514.zip

Create a directory for the new font and copy the files into that directory ..

sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/opentype/atkinson-hyperlegible
sudo cp ./Atkinson-Hyperlegible-Font-Print-and-Web-2020-0514/Print\ Fonts/*.otf /usr/share/fonts/opentype/atkinson-hyperlegible/

And then update the font cache so that applications are going to know about the font ..

fc-cache -f -v

Applications already running will likely need restarting to be able to use the cache with the new font information.