Blog · Typography
Verdana and Arial for dyslexia — do they actually help?
If you've looked up "best font for dyslexia" in the last two decades, you've almost certainly come across Verdana and Arial. Both appear on dyslexia organisation guidelines, school IT documents, and workplace accessibility policies. They're free, pre-installed, and "good enough" in most people's estimation. But are they actually good for dyslexic readers, or are they simply the best of what used to be available on every computer?
The short answer
Verdana is a genuinely solid choice for dyslexic readers — better than most sans-serifs of its era. Its wide letterforms, generous spacing, and distinctive glyphs for easily confused letters mean it holds up well even against newer fonts designed with dyslexia in mind.
Arial is mediocre for dyslexia, and is mostly recommended by inertia. It was designed to be metrically compatible with Helvetica, not to aid legibility at body sizes. Several of its letterforms are troublesome for dyslexic readers. It is not a bad font — but if your goal is reading ease rather than compatibility, you can do meaningfully better.
Why these two fonts keep coming up
In the early 2000s, when most dyslexia guidance was first formalised for the digital context, the choice of "accessible" fonts was narrow. On Windows, the pre-installed options were Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, Comic Sans, Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet MS. Of those, Verdana and Arial were the obvious sans-serif candidates — Comic Sans was already stigmatised, and Trebuchet was considered too decorative for body text.
The British Dyslexia Association, among others, produced guidance recommending sans-serif fonts over serif fonts, and Arial and Verdana became the default recommendations that filled the available slots. That guidance was written before fonts like Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, or OpenDyslexic existed. It stuck not because these fonts are optimal, but because they are genuinely serviceable and ubiquitous. The advice was good for its time.
The question worth asking now is: have they been outpaced? And for each font, the answer is different.
Verdana: what makes it better than average
Verdana was designed by Matthew Carter in 1994 and commissioned by Microsoft specifically for screen legibility. That design brief — not print, not large display type, but body text on low-resolution monitors — gave it properties that turn out to be genuinely useful for dyslexic readers.
Large x-height. Verdana's lowercase letters are tall relative to its capitals. This matters because legibility at normal body sizes depends primarily on the lowercase form of letters, not the uppercase. A large x-height means letters are easier to distinguish at 14–16 px. If you've ever noticed that Verdana "looks bigger" than Arial or Times New Roman at the same point size, that's why.
Wide letterforms and generous tracking. Verdana is a noticeably wide font. Its default inter-character spacing is more generous than Arial's, and each glyph is drawn slightly wider. Research on dyslexia and typography consistently finds that wider letter spacing reduces crowding — the phenomenon where letters seem to visually interfere with their neighbours, making words harder to parse. Verdana's native spacing approximates what many accessibility guidelines recommend adding manually to other fonts.
Distinct glyphs for easily confused letters. The lowercase 'a' in Verdana uses a double-storey design (the kind with a bowl and a tail, like a printed lowercase a) rather than a single-storey design (a plain circle with a stick). The double-storey 'a' is harder to confuse with 'o' or 'q'. Similarly, Verdana's 'l' (lowercase L) has a slight curve at the base, distinguishing it from 'I' (capital i) and '1' (one) — a trio that causes real problems in many fonts, especially on web forms. These are not accidents; they're the consequence of a design brief that explicitly prioritised screen legibility.
Where Verdana falls short: it is a wide font, and at the line lengths typical on modern websites (often 60–80 characters), it produces noticeably fewer words per line than Arial or Georgia. For some readers this is fine — shorter lines are linked to better reading comprehension for dyslexic adults. For others, particularly those who lose their place easily, fewer words per line means more frequent line-switching, which introduces its own tracking errors. This is a context-dependent drawback, not a categorical one.
Arial: what the recommendations miss
Arial was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders at Monotype, primarily to be a royalty-free substitute for Helvetica — metrically identical, so that documents set in Helvetica would print correctly with Arial installed. That design objective has nothing to do with legibility, let alone dyslexia. Arial's glyph shapes are inherited from a typeface family where aesthetics and geometric consistency were the goals, not differentiation of easily confused characters.
The problem shows up in specific letter pairs. Arial's lowercase 'l', capital 'I', and numeral '1' are extremely similar — in many sizes and rendering contexts, they're nearly identical. For a reader who already struggles to distinguish letterforms, this is a real hazard. Arial's 'a' uses a single-storey design, making it easier to confuse with 'o'. Its 'n' and 'h' are geometrically similar in ways that Verdana's versions are not.
Arial's spacing is also tighter than Verdana's by default — not catastrophically, but measurably. On a screen at 16 px with default browser rendering, Arial feels denser than Verdana at the same nominal size, and density is associated with higher rates of reading error in dyslexic populations.
None of this means Arial is inaccessible — it is, after all, a professional sans-serif used without issue by most readers. But for dyslexic readers specifically, the case for Arial rests almost entirely on its ubiquity and the absence of something better, not on its design properties.
What the research actually says
Formal research directly comparing Verdana and Arial for dyslexia is sparse, but adjacent studies fill in the picture. Work by Luz Rello and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University on font choice and dyslexia (published across several papers between 2012 and 2016) tested fonts including Arial and Helvetica against various alternatives. Their findings consistently showed that larger x-height and wider letter spacing produced lower error rates and higher subjective comfort ratings among dyslexic participants. Verdana scores well on both dimensions; Arial scores average.
A 2013 study by Rello and Baeza-Yates compared eight fonts for dyslexic readers and found that fonts with wider spacing and larger character bodies were rated significantly more readable. Fonts that were narrow or had a small x-height — which describes Arial more than Verdana — scored consistently lower.
More recent work has shifted attention toward fonts designed specifically for dyslexia. Lexend, developed in collaboration with the Lexend foundation and backed by Google Fonts research, improved reading speed and comprehension in a peer-reviewed study across hundreds of readers. Atkinson Hyperlegible was developed by the Braille Institute explicitly to maximise letter differentiation. Neither of these existed when Verdana and Arial became the standard recommendations.
Side-by-side: how they compare now
| Verdana | Arial | |
|---|---|---|
| x-height | Very large — good for screen legibility | Medium — average for a sans-serif |
| Letter spacing | Generous by default | Normal — tighter than Verdana |
| l / I / 1 confusion | Low — the 'l' has a curved base | High — all three look nearly identical |
| Lowercase 'a' | Double-storey — distinctive | Single-storey — easier to confuse with 'o' |
| Width | Wide — fewer words per line | Normal width |
| Design intent | Screen legibility at low resolution | Metrically compatible with Helvetica |
| Dyslexia suitability | Good — outperforms most sans-serifs from its era | Mediocre — adequate but not purposeful |
Where both fonts show their age
Even Verdana — the stronger of the two — was designed for 1990s-era monitors with 72–96 PPI resolution. Modern screens run at 220–400 PPI, and the hinting strategies Verdana uses to stay sharp at low pixel densities are no longer necessary. On a Retina or 4K display, Verdana's carefully hinted strokes can look slightly clunky compared to fonts optimised for high-DPI rendering.
More importantly, neither Verdana nor Arial was designed with the specific challenges of dyslexic readers in mind — the letter-rotation problem, the visual crowding problem, the line-tracking problem. Verdana accidentally solves several of these through its screen-legibility brief. Arial solves fewer of them.
The fonts that came after — OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible — were designed with those specific problems in mind. They're not universally better (some readers find OpenDyslexic's weighted bottoms distracting; some find Lexend's looseness makes it too slow for skimming), but they represent a different design intent. If you've been using Arial or Verdana because they're what the old guidance recommended, they're worth revisiting now that there are more purposeful alternatives.
Practical recommendations
If you're choosing between Verdana and Arial for a document, email, or presentation: choose Verdana. The wider spacing and distinctive 'a' and 'l' glyphs make it meaningfully more readable for dyslexic readers, and the extra width rarely matters unless you're fitting a lot of text into a fixed column.
If you're deciding whether to replace Verdana with something newer: yes, there are better options. Lexend and Atkinson Hyperlegible both outperform Verdana in terms of purposeful legibility design. OpenDyslexic is worth trying if letter rotation is part of your experience. Whether these replace Verdana depends on the context — for documents you're creating yourself, you can set whichever font you prefer. For websites you're reading, you need a tool to override the font.
If you're setting up a dyslexia-friendly workspace: Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Notion all let you change fonts at the document or account level. For the web at large, a browser font extension is the only practical approach — you can't rely on every website offering readable typography.
Changing the font across every website
LexiFont is a Chrome extension that replaces the font on every website with a font of your choice — Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, OpenDyslexic, or Comic Sans (which has a stronger dyslexia research base than its reputation suggests). The free tier lets you try any of these on any site. The Pro tier adds spacing controls — letter spacing, line height, and line length — which, as we've covered, are often as important as font choice itself.
If you've been using Verdana or Arial as a browser default and you've found them helpful, you may find that switching to Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible is a noticeable step up — the same category of improvement, but designed with more precision for exactly the problems you're trying to solve. It takes about thirty seconds to find out.
The quick test: install LexiFont, open an article you find hard to read, and switch between Arial, Verdana, Lexend, and Atkinson Hyperlegible in order. Most readers find the difference between their current font and the best-fit alternative noticeable within a paragraph. If Verdana is already your best font, you'll confirm it quickly. If Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible is better, you'll know that too.
Get LexiFont Pro — font and spacing controls for every website, $14.99 one-time
Further reading
- Serif vs sans-serif for dyslexia — what the research says
- Best fonts for dyslexia in 2026 — a research-first guide
- Font weight and dyslexia — does bold actually help?
- Line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia — what actually matters
- X-height and dyslexia — why tall lowercase letters are easier to read