Best Fonts for Dyslexia: What Actually Helps

There's a lot of confident-sounding advice online about the single best font for dyslexia. The honest picture is more mixed: formatting choices genuinely help, but the research on dedicated "dyslexia fonts" specifically is weaker than most people assume, and what helps varies from person to person. Here's what's actually well-supported, and where the evidence runs out.

Fonts commonly recommended for dyslexia

There's no single scientifically-proven "best" font, but a short list of plain, evenly-spaced sans-serif fonts comes up consistently in UK accessibility guidance, including from the British Dyslexia Association: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Comic Sans, Century Gothic, and Trebuchet MS. None of these were designed specifically for dyslexia — they're just clear, widely-available sans-serif fonts with letters that stay easy to tell apart at a glance. Comic Sans sits on most of these lists for a specific reason: its letters are less uniform than a typeface like Arial, which can make easily-confused pairs like b/d slightly easier to distinguish, even though it isn't to everyone's taste.

Sans-serif, and avoid anything too decorative

Sans-serif fonts (no small strokes at the ends of letters) are generally easier to read on screen than serif fonts, and this holds for most readers, not just dyslexic ones. The bigger win is simply avoiding decorative or overly stylised fonts — anything that makes individual letters harder to distinguish at a glance works against you regardless of dyslexia.

Increase line spacing and letter spacing

This has some of the strongest evidence behind it. Extra space between lines (1.5x line height or more) and slightly increased letter spacing reduces visual crowding — where nearby letters and lines interfere with each other as the eye tracks across text. This is often a bigger practical improvement than font choice alone — a 2016 study found that a specially-designed dyslexia font's apparent reading-speed benefit came from its spacing, not its letter shapes, and the advantage disappeared once a standard font was given the same spacing (Marinus et al., 2016 — see Sources).

Avoid justified text and pure white backgrounds

Justified text (stretched to align both edges) creates uneven gaps between words that can disrupt reading flow — left-aligned (ragged-right) text is easier to track. A very high-contrast pure white background can also cause visual glare for some readers; a soft off-white or light tint background is often more comfortable, though this varies by person and is worth testing rather than assuming.

What about OpenDyslexic and other "dyslexia fonts"?

OpenDyslexic and similar fonts weight the bottom of each letter to try to prevent letters being read upside down or flipped. It's a reasonable idea, but the research evidence is genuinely mixed. The most rigorous controlled study to date — a 2016 alternating-treatment study with primary-school children with dyslexia — found no improvement in reading speed or accuracy with OpenDyslexic compared to Arial or Times New Roman (Wery & Diliberto, 2016 — see Sources); a few smaller studies report modest gains, but with too few participants to generalise from. Meanwhile, some readers report a strong personal preference for it anyway, independent of measured performance.

The honest takeaway: it's worth trying since it's low-cost and some people do prefer it, but treat it as a personal preference to test, not a guaranteed fix — spacing, size, and contrast matter more consistently across the research.

Font size and line length

Larger text (18px+ for body text) reduces strain generally. Shorter line lengths — roughly 50-75 characters per line — are easier to track than very wide columns of text, since the eye has less distance to travel back to the start of the next line.

Where a tool like DyslexiaWrite fits in

DyslexiaWrite's reading modes let you adjust font, size, spacing, and colour tint directly, and switch between a Supported mode (reading ruler, colour tint, extra spacing) and a cleaner mode once you know what works for you — since, as above, the right formatting genuinely is personal rather than one-size-fits-all.

Frequently asked questions