Guide

Dyslexia-friendly fonts: which are free, which work, and what helps more

Several fonts are designed for dyslexic readers. The controlled studies that tested them found no speed or accuracy gain over Arial. Wider spacing, shorter lines, and no italics did help. Here is what to try, in order.

Updated October 2026. Sources at the end.

Is there a free font for dyslexia?

Yes, several, and you probably have two of them installed already.

Comic Sans gets laughed at, and the r/Dyslexia community keeps recommending it anyway. Its letters are irregular, so a b does not look like a mirrored d. That is the same idea OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie sell, and Comic Sans has shipped with Windows since 1995.

Does a dyslexia font actually work?

Three studies tested this with dyslexic readers rather than asking people which font they liked.

• Rello and Baeza-Yates (2013) had 48 dyslexic readers read passages in 12 fonts while an eye tracker measured them. Plain sans and monospaced fonts, Helvetica, Courier, Arial and Verdana among them, read fastest. Italic fonts read slowest. OpenDyslexic did not beat the plain fonts.
• Wery and Diliberto (2017) tested OpenDyslexic against Arial and Times New Roman with students who have dyslexia. Reading rate and accuracy did not improve in OpenDyslexic. Several students read it slower.
• Kuster and colleagues (2018) tested Dyslexie with Dutch children in two experiments. Dyslexie did not beat Arial. When they matched Arial's letter spacing to Dyslexie's, any small difference disappeared, which points at the spacing rather than the letter shapes.

So the special shapes are not doing the work. Some people still prefer OpenDyslexic, and preference is a fine reason to use it. Comfort over an hour of reading is something these studies did not measure.

What helps more than the font

Zorzi and colleagues (2012) gave 74 Italian and French dyslexic children the same text with normal and extra-wide letter spacing. With the wide spacing they made fewer than half as many errors and read more than 20 percent faster, in the same font.

The British Dyslexia Association's style guide turns this and similar findings into numbers you can set:

• Letter spacing around 35 percent of the average letter width.
• Word spacing about 3.5 times the letter spacing.
• Line spacing of 1.5.
• Body text at 12 to 14 point, or larger on screen.
• Left aligned, never justified, so the gaps between words stay even.
• Bold for emphasis. No italics, no underlining, no ALL CAPS.
• Cream or pale backgrounds instead of pure white.

Line length matters too. Long lines make it harder to find the start of the next one. Fifty to seventy characters per line is the usual target for body text, and most news sites run wider than that.

Which fonts to avoid

Italic fonts, in every study that measured them. Thin or light weights, which lose their shape at small sizes. Decorative serifs. Fonts where the capital I, lowercase l and digit 1 are identical strokes, which includes Gill Sans and most geometric sans fonts. And any font set in all capitals, since capitals share one height and lose the ascender and descender shapes that help you recognize a word.

Is a dyslexia font good for ADHD?

Nobody has tested it. The reading studies above recruited dyslexic readers, and the ADHD reading research looks at attention and working memory rather than letter shape. If you have ADHD and find a particular font easier to stay with, use it. The spacing and line-length rules apply either way, since they lower the effort of tracking a line regardless of why tracking is hard.

Fixation bolding, where the first few letters of each word are bold, is popular with ADHD readers. The largest published test, Readwise's 2022 study of 2,074 readers, found no reading speed or comprehension gain. Some people still find it easier to stay on the line with it, which is why the option exists.

Try them on any website

Font settings in your operating system do not reach web pages. A site chooses its own font and ignores yours. Calmer Web, our Chrome extension, overrides that on every page you open.

• The Font menu offers OpenDyslexic, Comic Neue, Atkinson Hyperlegible, a soft serif, and a gentle sans. Code, icons and SVG are left alone so sites keep working.
• One spacing slider runs from 0 to 100. At 100 it reaches the British Dyslexia Association figures above: 35 percent letter spacing and 3.5 times that between words.
• A reading ruler follows your pointer, lit to the height of the line under it, with the rest of the page shaded.
• Fixation bolding, if you want it, bolds the first 40 percent of each word.
• Layout cleanup left-aligns text, removes justification, italics and all caps, underlines links, and widens the gap between paragraphs.

Every setting can differ per site, so you can run the full set on a news site and leave your email client as it is. Settings stay in your browser. There is no account.