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Harry Potter For Dyslexics -
Summary:
An art student with reading difficulties has designed a new, much clearer typeface.
Article:
As a girl, Natascha Frensch used to dread the moment on a Tuesday afternoon when she and a handful of other slow readers were taken out of class and made to read aloud to each other. "We were all as bad as one another. Nothing went in," she recalls. "So it was totally pointless.''
Dutch-born Frensch struggled with reading in her schooldays and escaped into art and design at the earliest opportunity. Three years ago, soon after she had arrived at the Royal College of Art in London, two events coincided that were to change her life, and may in time alter the lives of many others. The first was being given an assignment on the theme of black and white. The second was finally discovering that she was dyslexic.
"At the time of the assignment, I was struggling through yet another book and I realised that, for me, print was the most significant expression of the contrast between black and white. I wondered if that was why I had such trouble reading, so, for my project, I designed a new typeface.''
It was the first step on a journey leading to the launch, this month, of Read Regular, a typeface designed by Frensch for people with dyslexia.
If you are a fluent reader, you have probably never given a thought to the typeface in which your printed material is delivered. But for dyslexics, everything from the font size to the quality of the paper and the colour of the background can make a difference.
People with dyslexia frequently experience visual distortion when reading. Some focus on the spaces rather than the words and see "rivers" running down the page. Words seem to have "halos" around them, text can appear fuzzy or to be swirling around. "One student told me that the last word always hops off the page and runs to the edge of the room," says Qona Rankin, dyslexia co-ordinator at the RCA.
Curiously, about 25 per cent of RCA students have some form of dyslexia, compared with 10 per cent of the general population. It has been suggested that people with dyslexia have superior visual and spatial abilities and that this is linked to the enhanced development of the right side of the brain. Rankin is sceptical.
"It is probably more to do with the fact that if you are not good at communicating through words as a child, you might tend to communicate through pictures," she says. "If you are constantly being told you have the wrong answer, it must be a relief to find a sphere where there is no right or wrong answer. And the more you draw, the better you get at it.''
This was Frensch's experience. "From the time I started reading, I was behind. But my art was always held up in class and others wanted to work with me. That's a good feeling, so you do more and you improve.''
Once Frensch had become aware of the possibilities of the typeface as an artistic medium, she was hooked. "The whole alphabet fascinated me, but I didn't just want to develop another typeface. It had to have a raison d'ętre. The aim of Read Regular is to make reading less of a struggle, so the energy spared can be used for comprehension.''
Most fonts derive from just a few letters. Typically, the artist decides how the "n" and the "o" should look and develops the rest of the alphabet from those basic shapes. Frensch considered every letter and wrote out each one hundreds of times to identify its unique characteristics.
Not everybody with dyslexia is troubled by the same letters, but certain problems commonly occur. Pairs of letters - "b" and "d" or "p" and "q" - are often confused. In Read Regular, the shapes of these pairs are different. Natascha has also looked at spacing and every combination of letters to ensure no two melt into one another. The typeface was tested on more than 100 dyslexics.
"We gave them a passage from Harry Potter in different fonts, and it was extraordinary how many found Read Regular easier to use," says Rankin. "They not only told us that they felt more comfortable with it, but I could also corroborate this by marking their fluency as they read aloud.''
Although Read Regular is not the first typeface designed for people with dyslexia, it is the only one that is intended to compete with mainstream fonts. This is why it delights Prof Jeremy Myerson, director of the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the RCA, which supports selected research associates in projects that promote inclusive design for excluded social groups. "Natascha has treated every letter form as a unique symbol and has then gone through the process of turning each one back into a consistent and coherent typeface. It addresses a special need, yet is not patronising to people with dyslexia, and anybody who does not have reading difficulties will see it as an ordinary typeface.''
Frensch hopes that Read Regular, which has been welcomed by the British Dyslexia Association, will be taken up by educational publishers. Her first publication is a guide for dyslexic students, produced by the Information and Learning Services department at the RCA, and she is working on a CD of the typeface that can be installed on home computers.
"Nobody is claiming this is a cure for dyslexia," says Prof Myerson. "But it is one solution that we hope will be widely used." The RCA has a history in typography. One of Natascha's former tutors, Margaret Calvert, designed the typeface for the signage used on roads in Britain and all over the world. Perhaps Read Regular will eventually be equally well read.
Health.Telegraph 
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