Blog · Children & reading
Dyslexia fonts for children - what to use at each age
There is no single "best font" for a child with dyslexia, because reading itself is not a single skill. A four-year-old who is still sounding out letters needs something very different from a twelve-year-old plodding through a history textbook. The font that helps your child this year may quietly start getting in the way next year. This guide walks through what changes at each stage of reading, and which fonts (and sizes, and spacings) tend to fit each stage well.
The short answer, by age
Ages 4-6 (emerging readers): a clear infant typeface with single-storey a and g - Sassoon Infant or Sassoon Primary, or Andika.
Ages 6-8 (decoding): Sassoon Primary or Andika continue; Comic Sans is a reasonable third choice. Avoid OpenDyslexic this early.
Ages 8-11 (reading to learn): drop the infant features. Move to a calm humanist sans like Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible, or introduce OpenDyslexic if letter rotation is part of the child's experience.
Ages 11-14 (independent readers): the adult fonts apply. Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or OpenDyslexic, with size and spacing doing as much work as the font itself.
Why age changes the answer
A child's reading goes through three rough phases, and the right font tracks the phase, not the calendar age. The first is letter recognition: the child is still learning which shape is which, and the cost of a confusing letter is high - it stops the read cold. The second is decoding: the child can name letters reliably but has to assemble each word from its parts, so the page is being processed one syllable at a time. The third is fluent reading, where words are recognised as whole units and attention can finally move from "what does this say" to "what does this mean."
Dyslexia stretches all three phases out. A dyslexic child often spends years longer in the decoding phase than a typically-developing peer, and may never lose the residual cost of letter confusion in certain glyphs. That is why the font choice keeps mattering past the age when most children stop thinking about it - and why the same child may need different fonts in primary, middle, and secondary school.
The letterforms that matter most at each stage
Before going age by age, three letterform features come up again and again:
Single-storey vs double-storey a and g. A "double-storey" a is the printed shape with the curl above the bowl, like the one you are reading now. The "single-storey" a is the handwritten shape, a simple circle with a tail. Young readers learn the single-storey shape first because that is how they write it. Forcing the printed double-storey too early adds an extra mental translation step. The same is true for g.
Disambiguated b, d, p, q. These four letters are mirror images of each other in most fonts, which is why so many young readers (dyslexic or not) flip them. Fonts that give each one a subtly different weight or terminal - OpenDyslexic does this most aggressively, Andika and Atkinson Hyperlegible do it more quietly - cut the confusion at its source.
Open counters and generous spacing. The "counter" is the white space inside letters like o, e, a. When counters are small and the letters sit close together, words turn into dense visual lumps. Open counters and roomy spacing slow nothing down for a confident reader and rescue a struggling one.
Most of the rest of this guide is about which features matter most at which age.
Ages 4-6: emerging readers
What is happening
The child is still mapping shapes to sounds. Every novel letter shape is a cost. The child writes single-storey a and g, so anything else on the page is a translation. Fluency is not yet a goal; recognition is.
What to use
A typeface designed specifically for infant reading. Sassoon Infant and Sassoon Primary were designed by Rosemary Sassoon by sitting with children and watching which shapes they could and could not parse - the design brief was literally written from the child's eye. Andika from SIL is a free open-source alternative with the same single-storey approach, and it ships with disambiguated b/d/p/q by default.
Size: at least 18pt on screen, 16pt on paper. Spacing: 1.5 line height. Background: off-white or cream, never bright white. Bold: reserve it for proper nouns the child is learning to recognise as wholes.
We have a dedicated piece on Sassoon Primary for children with dyslexia that goes deeper on this family and where it falls short. The short version: Sassoon is the most evidence-backed infant typeface available, but it is not magic - the spacing, size, and background carry as much of the load as the letterforms.
One thing to avoid at this age: OpenDyslexic. It is a powerful tool for older dyslexic readers because of its weighted-bottom letter shapes, but for a child still learning what letters even are, the heavy, bouncy baseline reads as visual chaos. Save it for later.
Ages 6-8: decoding
What is happening
The child can name almost every letter and is starting to assemble words by sounding them out. Letter confusion is still high; was and saw, on and no, b and d all routinely swap. Reading is effortful and stamina is low - maybe ten or fifteen minutes before fatigue sets in.
What to use
Continue with Sassoon Primary or Andika. If neither is available - a lot of school-issued material is locked to a corporate sans - Comic Sans is a defensible fallback. It is widely mocked but happens to have nearly all the features that help a young dyslexic reader: open counters, slightly irregular letterforms that resist mirror-rotation, generous spacing, and a friendly tone that lowers reading anxiety.
If your school will allow it, ask for materials in Open-Dyslexic-A or stick with whichever of the above is already familiar. Switching fonts in this phase has a real cost - the child has memorised certain shapes by now, and a new font resets some of that.
Size: 16-18pt. Line height: 1.5-1.7. Word spacing: noticeably wider than default. Bold: still sparing.
We have a fuller post on Comic Sans and dyslexia if you want the case for and against. The short answer: it is a much better dyslexia font than its reputation suggests, and a perfectly reasonable choice for a primary-school child whose school sheets arrive in it by default.
Ages 8-11: reading to learn
What is happening
Most non-dyslexic peers are now reading to learn - text is a tool, not the task. Many dyslexic children at this age are caught in the middle: they can read, but reading is still slow enough that they cannot use it the way a teacher expects. The mismatch between expectation and effort is where reading anxiety hardens.
What to use
This is the age to graduate from infant typefaces. The single-storey a and g have done their job; staying with them risks making the child's reading look childish (which they will notice) and creates a small extra hop when they meet printed text in books, signs, and screens that all use the double-storey shapes.
Move to a calm humanist sans. Lexend was designed with reading research in mind and is now a strong default - tall x-height, open counters, and a measured rhythm. Atkinson Hyperlegible, designed by the Braille Institute, disambiguates the b/d/p/q quartet more carefully than almost any mainstream font. Either is a fine fit. If letter rotation has been a persistent issue, this is the right time to try OpenDyslexic as well - many children who would have found it disorienting at six find it useful at nine.
Size: 15-17pt on screen. Line height: 1.5. Background: still off-white. Reading sessions: 20-25 minutes with a break.
Two side reads at this age: Lexend in Chrome covers the research behind Lexend's claims, and our OpenDyslexic vs Lexend piece is the practical comparison for parents deciding between the two.
Ages 11-14: independent readers
What is happening
The child is reading for school, for hobbies, on a phone, on a Chromebook, on paper. Reading volume is now high enough that comfort matters more than novelty. The font that "works" is the one the child wants to use voluntarily for an hour - which is not always the one a research paper recommends.
What to use
The adult palette applies. Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and OpenDyslexic are all defensible. The right answer is the one your child picks after a week of trying each on a long read. Let them choose; the willingness to keep reading matters more than any 5% comprehension delta.
The bigger lever at this age is no longer the font - it is size and spacing. A child reading on a phone at 14pt with default line height is doing work no font can rescue. See our piece on font size for dyslexic adults - the recommendations apply downward from about age 11.
Size: 16pt minimum on phones, 17-18pt on laptops. Line height: 1.5-1.6. Bold: use for headings and key terms. Reader mode: teach the child to use it - this is the single highest-leverage skill they will pick up about screen reading.
Settings that matter more than the font
At every age, the same three settings carry most of the load and are worth getting right before agonising over typeface:
Background colour. Pure white triggers visual stress for many dyslexic readers, children especially. A cream or pale grey background drops the contrast just enough to reduce glare without losing legibility. This is true on paper and on screen.
Line height. Default browser line height is around 1.2, which is too tight for any struggling reader. 1.5 is the floor; 1.6-1.7 is better for long passages.
Line length. A line longer than about 70 characters forces the eye to make a long return sweep to the next line - the place where children most often lose their place. Aim for 50-65 characters per line, even if that means a narrower column with more white space around it.
These three settings together do more than any font swap. Get them right and almost any reasonable typeface becomes usable; get them wrong and even the best dyslexia font feels heavy. We cover this in more depth in the 2026 dyslexia-font guide.
What about OpenDyslexic for kids?
OpenDyslexic gets recommended a lot for children, often by well-meaning adults who saw a viral post about it. The honest picture: it is a useful tool from roughly age eight onward for children who specifically experience letter rotation, and it is the wrong tool before that. The weighted-bottom letterforms are visually loud, the baseline feels bouncy, and a child still learning what letters look like will absorb that bounciness as part of "what reading is" - which makes the eventual transition to standard typefaces harder.
If you want to try it, wait until the child can read a sentence in a familiar font without sounding out every word, then offer OpenDyslexic as one option alongside Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible. Let the child pick after a week of using each. The research finding to keep in mind is that OpenDyslexic does not usually make children read faster; it makes some of them read with fewer errors on the specific letters they confuse. That is a real benefit but a narrow one.
How LexiFont fits in
If your child reads on a Chromebook, a school laptop, or any device with Chrome, LexiFont lets you set the dyslexia-friendly font of your choice for every website with one click - including the school portal, Google Classroom, BBC Bitesize, and any reading app that runs in a browser. It defaults to OpenDyslexic on the free tier; the Pro tier unlocks Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Comic Neue, which covers the age range from primary through early secondary.
The honest caveat: LexiFont changes fonts inside the browser only. School books, printed worksheets, and most native iPad apps are outside its reach. For those, the conversation to have with the school is whether materials can be issued in Sassoon, Andika, or Comic Sans - all three are free for educational use and all three are dyslexia-friendlier than the corporate sans most schools default to.
One more thing: let the child choose
Children are surprisingly good at picking the font that works for them, if you give them a real choice and enough time with each. The most reliable picking protocol we have seen is: load the same paragraph in three or four candidate fonts side by side, ask the child to read each one aloud, then ask which one felt easiest. The font they pick is usually the one that lets them read longest before they get tired - which is the metric that matters more than any speed test.
The corollary: do not switch fonts on your child without telling them. A font swap mid-year, even to a "better" font, costs them a week of fluency. The right time to consider a change is at the start of a school year, or when reading has been visibly stalling for a month or more.