Blog · Comparisons

Dyslexie Font vs OpenDyslexic

10 min read · May 31, 2026

Two typefaces. Both designed specifically for dyslexic readers. Both rely on the same core trick - heavier bottoms on every letter, exaggerated shape contrast between b/d/p/q, wider word spacing. One has been free for fifteen years. The other costs roughly seventy euros a year for a single home licence. If you have been looking at both and trying to decide whether the paid one buys you something the free one does not, the honest answer is shorter than you probably expect.

The short answer

What they actually do

Both fonts attack the same perceived problem: that ordinary typefaces let dyslexic readers mistake one letter for another by mental rotation or by mirroring. The lowercase b and d are the same shape rotated 180 degrees. The lowercase p and q are mirror images. The capital I, the lowercase l, and the digit 1 are nearly indistinguishable in many sans-serifs. Dyslexie Font and OpenDyslexic both try to break those symmetries by adding visual weight, asymmetric features, and exaggerated openings.

Dyslexie Font

Designed by Dutch graphic designer Christian Boer as part of his graduation thesis in 2008 and commercialised in 2010, Dyslexie Font weights the bottom of each glyph, tilts the openings of letters like c and e outward, lengthens ascenders and descenders, and applies generous word spacing. Boer's design is conservative compared with OpenDyslexic - the shapes still feel like a normal sans-serif, just with quietly emphasised feet.

OpenDyslexic

Released a year later, in 2011, by Abelardo Gonzalez and maintained as open source under the SIL Open Font License, OpenDyslexic uses the same core idea but pushes the contrast harder. The bottoms of letters are noticeably heavier - sometimes described as "bouncy" - the openings are wider, and the asymmetric weighting is much more visible. The result is a louder typeface that telegraphs its purpose at a glance.

Both fonts come with sister styles. Dyslexie ships a regular and a bold, plus a separate Dyslexie Sans for body copy. OpenDyslexic ships regular, bold, italic, bold-italic, and a monospaced variant - OpenDyslexic Mono - that programmers can use in their editor, which we covered separately in reading code with dyslexia.

Side by side

What the research actually says

The Dyslexie Font studies

The most-cited result in favour of Dyslexie Font is a small 2010 study by Renske de Leeuw, supervised at the University of Twente, which reported faster reading with fewer errors among Dutch dyslexic adults using Dyslexie Font versus Arial. The study was the basis for much of the marketing that followed, and it is the figure most often quoted on the product page.

A larger replication has not been kind. In 2018, Kuster, van Weerdenburg, Gompel and Bosman published a study in the Annals of Dyslexia with 170 Dutch primary-school children, half with dyslexia and half without, comparing reading speed and accuracy in Dyslexie Font versus Arial. The result was clear: Dyslexie Font conferred no measurable benefit on either reading rate or error rate, in either group. A handful of children preferred its appearance; that was the only positive finding. The authors noted that this matches what we would expect from typographic theory - the letter-shape symmetries the font tries to break are mostly not the actual bottleneck in dyslexic reading.

The follow-up literature has largely sided with Kuster et al. A 2020 review by Galliussi, Perondi, Chia, Gerbino and Bernardis in Annals of Dyslexia found no robust evidence that specialised dyslexia fonts improve reading speed when font size and spacing are controlled for. What matters, that review argued, is letter spacing and word spacing - not the letterforms themselves.

The OpenDyslexic studies

OpenDyslexic has been tested in similar setups and comes out with roughly the same verdict. Rello and Baeza-Yates (2013) compared OpenDyslexic against Arial and Times New Roman in 48 dyslexic Spanish readers and found no objective speed advantage but a small reduction in fixation duration. Wery and Diliberto (2017) tested OpenDyslexic against Arial and Times New Roman in 27 American students with dyslexia. Reading rate and accuracy were unchanged; subjective preference for OpenDyslexic was high.

So the honest position on both fonts is the same: neither typeface measurably speeds up reading, and neither measurably reduces errors at the population level. What both do, for some readers, is make text feel more comfortable - and reading comfort is what determines whether you keep reading. That is a real benefit, but it is a benefit you can get for free.

Where Dyslexie Font is genuinely better

Three places, none of them about the reading experience itself.

Institutional procurement. Schools, employers and disability services often need to buy a product. A free open-source typeface is easy for an IT department to dismiss, even when it would do the job. Dyslexie Font has a sales contact, a recognisable invoice, and a school-licensing tier. If you are trying to get a font deployed to every Word install in a district, the paid option is sometimes easier to actually ship.

Polish on the shapes. Dyslexie Font's restraint is its main aesthetic strength. The letters look more like a normal sans-serif than OpenDyslexic does. If you find OpenDyslexic's bounce distracting, Dyslexie Font is the obvious next thing to try - the same core idea with the volume turned down.

Support and updates. A subscription buys you a phone number. The product is actively maintained, ships with a browser extension for Chrome and Edge, and offers a Word and Outlook plug-in. OpenDyslexic is also maintained but it is a one-person project with no warranty.

Where OpenDyslexic wins

Cost. Free, forever, including for institutions. The SIL Open Font License lets a school deploy it to a thousand machines without asking anyone.

Availability everywhere. Because of the open licence, OpenDyslexic is bundled inside almost every dyslexia tool that ships a font - Chrome extensions, Kindle font packs, e-reader sideloads, accessibility menus on some Linux distros. Dyslexie Font is locked to its own delivery channels.

More weights and a monospaced variant. OpenDyslexic Mono in particular is the only legitimately dyslexia-friendly monospaced font with an open licence. If you write code or read terminal output, that is a real gap Dyslexie Font does not fill.

Better fit for the browser. Any Chrome extension that overrides webfonts can apply OpenDyslexic to every site you visit. LexiFont does this in one click on the free tier, alongside Lexend and Atkinson Hyperlegible on Pro. Dyslexie Font's own browser extension exists but is paid and sees less third-party integration.

Which one should you actually use?

Try OpenDyslexic first. It is free, it is one click away inside any dyslexia-font extension, and it carries the same evidence profile as Dyslexie Font. Read in it for a week. If the shapes feel right, you are done.

If OpenDyslexic feels too bouncy or too obviously "the dyslexia font," try Dyslexie Font as a trial. You will get a clean, slightly more sober interpretation of the same idea, and you will be able to tell within a day whether the calmer shapes work better for you. If they do, decide whether the subscription is worth it relative to switching to a third option entirely - Lexend and Atkinson Hyperlegible take a completely different approach and many readers settle on one of those.

If you are a parent, teacher or accessibility coordinator buying for someone else, the calculus is different. Pay for Dyslexie Font if you need a procurement-friendly product with structured support. Use OpenDyslexic if you have IT autonomy and want the same outcome for nothing. There is no shame in either choice - both fonts have roughly equal evidence and roughly equal real-world utility.

The thing that matters more than either font

It is worth saying this clearly because the marketing for both products elides it. The strongest evidence in the dyslexia-typography literature is not for any specific font - it is for spacing. Increasing letter spacing by roughly 2.5%, widening word spacing, raising line height to 1.6 or above, and shortening line length to around 60-80 characters delivers measurable speed and accuracy gains across multiple studies, in any typeface. A reader using Arial with proper spacing will usually beat a reader using Dyslexie Font or OpenDyslexic at default spacing.

So before you put money on the table for a paid font, fix the spacing. We covered the exact numbers in our spacing guide; the short version is that the wins are big, free, and built into any modern reading extension. After that, pick the typeface that makes you want to keep reading - which, for most people, is the free one.

Test both, right now, for free

You can run a real comparison in five minutes. Pick a long article you have not read yet - a Wikipedia entry, a news feature, a long blog post on LexiFont itself if you like - and install LexiFont. The free tier flips the page into OpenDyslexic in one click. Read the first two paragraphs. Toggle back to the original font. Read another two paragraphs. Do you want to keep reading more in OpenDyslexic or in the original? That is your answer for the cheaper of the two.

For Dyslexie Font, the company offers a free trial period on their own browser extension. Install it on the same article. Compare it directly to OpenDyslexic. If you genuinely prefer Dyslexie Font's calmer shapes and you read enough every week for the subscription to feel proportionate, pay for it. If you do not feel a clear difference, you have just saved seventy euros a year.

Get LexiFont Pro - OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Comic Neue for $14.99 one-time

Further reading

• Best fonts for dyslexia in 2026 - a research-first guide
• OpenDyslexic in Chrome - what it does and how to use it well
• OpenDyslexic vs Lexend - side-by-side for dyslexic readers
• Serif vs sans-serif for dyslexic readers - what the research says
• Comic Sans and dyslexia - myth vs reality