Just switching from a narrowly spaced typeface to one with more spaces between letters can significantly ease dyslexic students’ reading difficulties, according to a study of French and Italian children.
For the study, which was set to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers asked 94 dyslexic children ages 8 to 14 to read a text of 24 short sentences with letters spaced in the standard way or placed twice as far apart. They found the children were able to read the wider-spaced text more than 20 percent faster and twice as accurately as the narrow type.
