Blog · Typography
Dyslexia-friendly font pairing — headings and body text
Most dyslexia font advice focuses on body text — which face to use for the paragraphs you actually read. But headings matter too. A jarring heading font can break the visual rhythm, while a well-chosen one makes a page easier to scan and navigate. This guide covers which heading typefaces work alongside OpenDyslexic, Lexend, and Atkinson Hyperlegible, and why some combinations that look fine in a design tool fall apart under real reading conditions.
Why font pairing matters when you have dyslexia
For neurotypical readers, font pairing is mostly an aesthetic concern — does the heading have enough contrast with the body? Does the combination feel cohesive? For dyslexic readers, the stakes are slightly different. A few specific things tend to cause trouble:
High-contrast letterform shifts. If your body font has heavily modified letterforms — as OpenDyslexic does, with its weighted-bottom glyphs — switching to a conventional heading font forces the eye to recalibrate between letters it has been processing one way and letters it now needs to process another way. That recalibration takes a small but real cognitive toll each time you return from a heading to body text.
Decorative serifs in headings. Ornate serif typefaces (think Old Style faces with high contrast between thick and thin strokes) are popular choices for editorial headings, but they introduce exactly the kind of ambiguous letterforms that create difficulty for some dyslexic readers. A heavily serifed uppercase I, for instance, can read as the number 1. The lowercase a in many traditional serifs has a single-storey shape that looks nothing like the double-storey a in most sans-serifs, causing a momentary hiccup when context switches.
Very narrow or compressed heading cuts. Condensed typefaces are common in display uses because they let designers fit long headings into tight spaces. For dyslexic readers, letter-spacing and character width are meaningful accessibility variables — narrow characters reduce the distinctiveness between glyphs. Wide, open letterforms are almost always better.
None of this means you're locked into using the same font for headings and body. A good pairing is one where the heading font is clearly distinct enough to communicate hierarchy, but shares enough visual DNA with your body font that switching between them doesn't feel like a gear-change.
Pairing with Lexend
Lexend is one of the most versatile dyslexia-oriented body fonts available. Its family spans multiple widths (Lexend Deca, Lexend Exa, Lexend Giga, and so on), but the base Lexend Regular — the one on Google Fonts — is a geometric sans-serif with wide, open apertures and generous letter-spacing. It was designed around research on visual encoding efficiency by Thomas Jockin and the Harvard Vision Lab.
Because Lexend already has a large type family, the simplest pairing is to use a heavier weight or a wider variant for headings. Lexend Bold at 2 - 2.5rem for H2 alongside Lexend Regular for body copy creates hierarchy through weight alone, without any visual clash. If you need something that reads as more distinctly "heading-like," consider:
Making sense of your reading difficulties
Lexend was designed with letter-by-letter visual processing in mind. Each character is drawn to be as distinct as possible from its neighbours, reducing the confusion that comes from similar-looking glyphs.
Inter (free, on Google Fonts) is an excellent pairing with Lexend. Both are humanist-leaning geometric sans-serifs. Inter is slightly narrower than Lexend, which creates a natural visual signal that "this is a heading" — headings are denser, body is more airy. The letterforms are compatible enough that the visual rhythm stays stable. Inter also has a four-storey 'g' and an open-tail 'a' that are highly distinguishable at heading sizes.
Source Sans 3 is another strong option — its proportions sit between Lexend and Inter, and it has been widely used in educational and accessibility contexts. Nunito works well for contexts aimed at children or younger adults: its rounded terminals are friendly without being fussy, and it pairs cleanly with Lexend's geometry.
What to avoid with Lexend: traditional serif heading fonts like Georgia or Garamond. They look elegant but the shift in contrast (high contrast thick-to-thin strokes vs Lexend's even stroke weight) is visually noisy for dyslexic readers, especially at the edges of the page where peripheral vision processes before the central gaze lands.
Pairing with Atkinson Hyperlegible
Atkinson Hyperlegible, developed by the Braille Institute, was designed specifically around legibility rather than readability — that is, it optimises individual character recognition at a glance, rather than optimising reading flow over long paragraphs. The result is a font with very exaggerated glyph differentiation: the capital I has serifs (even though the font is technically a sans-serif in its overall design), the zero has a clear slash, and the lowercase l has a distinctive curl at the baseline. We covered it in depth in our Atkinson Hyperlegible in Chrome guide.
The unusual detail in Atkinson Hyperlegible creates a pairing challenge: its heading-weight version (Bold) doesn't change the design language much — you still have the slightly eccentric glyph forms that make it work for legibility. A strong pairing keeps that distinctiveness in the body while giving headings a slightly more neutral character, so that navigation through the document is clear:
What makes a font legible for low-vision readers?
Atkinson Hyperlegible uses exaggerated glyph differentiation — a slash through the zero, an I with serifs, a curved l — to make each character recognisable at a glance, even at smaller sizes or with reduced contrast.
Using Lexend Bold for headings alongside Atkinson Hyperlegible body text is one of the most reliable combinations for accessibility-focused documents. Both fonts belong to a similar neutral humanist tradition; neither is decorative. The heading-to-body switch feels gentle. The contrast you need for visual hierarchy comes from size and weight, not from a dramatic change in typeface personality.
Work Sans is another good choice for heading text here. It is slightly more "editorial" than Lexend — designed with a print-magazine sensibility — but its wide apertures and clear glyph differentiation are compatible with Atkinson Hyperlegible's values. It is also free on Google Fonts and renders cleanly at small sizes, which matters for subheadings (H3, H4) where size alone stops providing enough hierarchy and you need the heading face to carry weight.
Pairing with OpenDyslexic
OpenDyslexic is the most visually distinctive of the three major dyslexia fonts. Its weighted-bottom letterforms are immediately recognisable. This creates a specific challenge for heading pairings: almost any conventional sans-serif heading will look jarring placed above a paragraph of OpenDyslexic body text, because the contrast in design philosophy is so stark.
The most comfortable solution is usually to use OpenDyslexic itself for headings as well, relying on size and weight differences to create visual hierarchy:
Reading with less effort — what OpenDyslexic actually changes
The weighted bottoms on OpenDyslexic glyphs are designed to give each letter an unambiguous orientation — so that b and d, p and q, cannot collapse into each other through rotation in the reader's perception.
If you need a separate heading face — for example in a study guide where the section titles need to feel clearly categorically different from the body — Nunito Sans or Poppins are the most compatible options. Both use rounded, open letterforms that share some of the warmth of OpenDyslexic without the heavy-bottom eccentricity. The visual transition between a Poppins heading and an OpenDyslexic paragraph is manageable in a way that, say, a Playfair Display heading over OpenDyslexic body text is not.
One combination that works surprisingly well is OpenDyslexic for body + DM Sans for headings. DM Sans is a grotesque sans-serif with wide letter spacing and a slightly informal personality that doesn't clash with OpenDyslexic's design character. It signals heading clearly, but it doesn't feel like it belongs to a completely different typographic tradition. See also our guide on OpenDyslexic in Chrome for how to apply it across websites.
Quick-reference pairing table
| Body font | Best heading options | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Lexend | Lexend Bold (self-paired), Inter, Source Sans 3, Nunito | Garamond, Georgia, narrow condensed faces (Oswald, Barlow Condensed) |
| Atkinson Hyperlegible | Lexend Bold, Work Sans, Atkinson Hyperlegible Bold (self-paired) | High-contrast serifs (Playfair Display, EB Garamond), script fonts |
| OpenDyslexic | OpenDyslexic Bold (self-paired), Nunito Sans, Poppins, DM Sans | Most conventional sans-serifs (Roboto, Helvetica), any serif display face |
The special case of H3 and smaller subheadings
Most of the discussion above concerns H1 and H2 headings. The H3 and below are trickier. At 1rem to 1.1rem, a heading font that looks fine at H2 size can lose its distinction from body text. The usual fix — making it bolder — risks creating a page that feels noisy and over-punctuated.
For dyslexic readers, the best solution for H3 and H4 is often not a different font at all, but rather a slightly larger size in your body font (1.05rem - 1.1rem) with a medium weight, paired with a slightly increased line-height before the subheading and a small colour change (a desaturated accent colour, not a jarring contrast). This keeps the subheading legible and clearly hierarchical without introducing another glyph-set to parse.
If you are working in CSS, a practical H3 rule for dyslexia-friendly body copy looks something like:
h3 { font-family: inherit; /* same as body */ font-size: 1.05rem; font-weight: 600; margin-top: 2rem; color: var(--accent); /* subtle colour shift */ letter-spacing: 0.02em; }
This approach is used by several dyslexia-oriented reading applications precisely because it reduces the number of typeface shifts the reader processes per page, while still making the document structure clear.
What about fonts you can't change — on other websites?
The pairing principles above are most immediately useful when you are creating something — a study guide, a document, a blog, a report. But most reading happens on websites where you have no control over the default font choices. A site may use a heading font that clashes with your comfortable body-reading font, or vice versa.
This is exactly the use case LexiFont was built for. With LexiFont installed in Chrome, you can override the fonts on any website — replacing the body text with Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or OpenDyslexic at the click of a button — while leaving other aspects of the page intact. The Pro tier extends this to per-site font preferences, so a news site you visit daily can always load in your preferred font, without you needing to reset it each time. Our guide on how to change the font on any website in Chrome walks through the setup in detail.
You cannot currently specify a different heading font from within LexiFont — it applies a single font family across the page — but the result is that headings and body text always share the same typeface, which is actually the most conservative and comfortable option from an accessibility standpoint. No pairing to get wrong.
Practical recommendations by use case
Writing study notes (Google Docs, Word, Notion): Lexend body + Lexend Bold for headings is the simplest reliable option. Both are available in Google Docs via Google Fonts. For more visual interest without accessibility cost, try Atkinson Hyperlegible body + Work Sans headings — both are available as Google Fonts.
Building a personal website or blog: If your audience includes dyslexic readers, Lexend body + Inter headings is widely supported and renders well at all sizes. Use font-display: swap in your CSS to prevent invisible text while the fonts load.
Creating accessible PDFs or print documents: OpenDyslexic self-paired is the safest choice — no pairing ambiguity, and the font embeds cleanly. For more polished print output where OpenDyslexic's eccentricity is too strong, Atkinson Hyperlegible throughout is the best accessible alternative. Read our guide on dyslexia-friendly typefaces for print for more details on print-specific considerations.
Presenting slides: Heading fonts for slides need to be legible from a distance, which changes the calculus slightly. At large sizes (36pt+), even conventional sans-serifs become accessible. Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible at bold weight for slide titles works well. Avoid body text smaller than 24pt for audiences that include dyslexic readers. We covered this further in our guide to dyslexia-friendly presentation fonts.
The one principle that overrides everything: test your pairing on the actual text you will be reading, not just a headline specimen. Body text has rhythm. Headings interrupt it. The only way to know if a pairing holds up is to read several pages of real content in it — not a word or a sentence, several pages.
A note on line spacing and letter spacing with paired fonts
Font pairing decisions do not exist in isolation from spacing decisions. A good heading-body pairing can be undermined by insufficient whitespace before and after headings, or by inconsistent line-height. When switching between a heading and a body font, the visual rhythm of the text should feel like a deliberate pause, not a collision.
For dyslexic readers, we generally recommend at least 1.5x the heading's font-size as the margin-top before a major heading, and at least 0.75x as the margin-bottom before the first body paragraph that follows. This gives the eye a visual resting point between scanning the heading and beginning to process the body text. The line spacing and letter spacing guide on this site covers the spacing values in detail.