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Almost exactly four years ago, in June 2020, I published an episode of Access-Ability titled “Video Games Need to Better Support Dyslexic Players”.
At the time, video games were starting to get better about offering subtitle and UI text altering options such as size alteration, customisable opacity backgrounds, and other basic tools, but options for font legibility alteration were still very much in their infancy, and far from seeing mass adoption.
Skipping forward to today, things are undeniably improving considerably for dyslexic gamers. A lot more video games today, particularly those with stylised custom fonts, are offering basic options for font alteration to players, alongside increased support for things like text to speech providing additional support for dyslexic players who may find audio narration makes text based games easier to follow.
However, I think it’s important to revisit the topic of support for dyslexic players, as an industry standard seems to be forming that could do with some nuanced discussion.
So, let’s discuss OpenDyslexic, and why it alone isn’t enough for a game to be truly accessible for all dyslexic players.
OpenDyslexic was created in the early 2010s as an open source font, based on a prior open source font called DejaVu Sans. The font was created with the explicit aim of providing a font designed to try and help avoid some of the common reading errors experienced by people with dyslexia, and as an alternative to pricey or proprietary Dyslexia focused fonts and reading tools that were available at the time.
Open Dyslexic as a font is complicated to discuss. While it is seemingly becoming the video game industry’s default alternative font option offering, responses to it from within the dyslexic community are far from unified.
Anecdotally, there are a lot of people who do find OpenDyslexic an easier font to read. I myself fall into that camp, finding it a really useful font that I’m personally really excited any time I see offered. I also know there’s a decent number of dyslexic people who vehemently disagree, and find it actively more difficult to read than other more common fonts. Research studies on the topic have been inconclusive at best, with some studies finding no statistically significant improvement in reading speed or accuracy with the font, while others found improvements but only with extended use.
Including OpenDyslexic as a font option in your game isn’t a bad idea. It’s going to likely help a good number of dyslexic players to have an easier time reading your in game text, particularly if your in game text is in a particularly difficult to read custom font, and as long as it’s an optional font alternative players who find it actively unhelpful can avoid it.
However, I’m here today not to argue that OpenDyslexic should be avoided as a font option to offer players. I’m here to argue that it needs to be one of a number of options that dyslexic players have access to.
OpenDyslexic is a tool, but is not by itself a full solution to dyslexia friendly fonts in games.
So, what other font options should game developers be offering alongside OpenDyslexic if they want to support a larger percentage of dyslexic gamers? Well, here’s a list of some commonly discussed fonts that, if you’re able to implement or mimic, could help to flesh out your font offering selection for dyslexic players.
As much as it is frequently mocked online, or treated as a joke, Comic Sans is an incredibly popular font option used by people with dyslexia for improved legibility. Sans Serif fonts in general are shown to have statistical legibility improvements for dyslexic readers, but among those options Comic Sans routinely shows up in discussions as being a very comfortable font to read and to follow. I’m bringing Comic Sans up first in this discussion because, throughout my polling of people on this topic, it was by far the most commonly suggested font choice that was found to help dyslexic readers.
Additionally, many people with dyslexia report finding that monospace fonts, where each alphanumeric character takes up a fixed and consistent amount of space rather than being a variable width per character, are easier to read due to the separation between letters and the consistency of spacing that’s provided. These fonts may be harder to incorporate into games due to their taking up more space per character to display, but they are worth consideration.
Atkinson Hyperlegible is an example of a monospaced font that, while primarily designed for low vision accessibility, has been brought up to me by multiple people with dyslexia as a particularly legible monospaced font option for them.
There’s also the topic of “Bionic Reading”, which is a proprietary system that isn’t directly going to be something you can incorporate into your game the way that you would a font, but is worth researching and understanding as part of this discussion. The system bolds certain parts of words in text in an attempt to get the reader not to glaze over the text as one large chunk. This can be helpful for some dyslexic readers, as well as some readers with ADHD. As previously mentioned it’s a proprietary system, but it is something that’s worth researching, and considering as a data point in understanding approaches to improving text legibility.
I’m not telling you to try and find a way to mimic a proprietary piece of software, but I am saying “learn from what it does well and maybe see what you can learn from that”.
Lastly, and perhaps initially counter-intuitively, many people who have dyslexia report finding that the easiest fonts for them to read are fonts they come across in everyday contexts. While some fonts like Ariel are Sans Serif fonts and make some degree of sense as dyslexia friendly, others such as Times New Roman and Helvetica score highly for legibility with some dyslexic readers purely due to being commonly encountered. Some people find them easier to read because they’ve had to struggle reading them, and have had time practising with their specific shapes.
The fact is that a font that you struggle with, but you struggle with regularly, might be easier for some dyslexic people to read than a new font that is trying to be more legible.
Again, the point of this discussion isn’t to suggest that offering support for OpenDyslexic as an alternative font in your game is bad, actively far from it. Undoubtedly, offering it as an option is going to increase the number of people who find your text easier to read. The point opf this is that it’s not the be all and end all of the conversation, and we need to ensure that we don’t formalise or standardise the belief that OpenDyslexic support means that your game has perfected dyslexia accessibility.
By offering multiple font alteration options, based on the advice above, you can go a long way to improving how many people find your game easy to read. Offering something like a selection of your own default stylised default font option, plus OpenDyslexic, and Comic Sans, as well as a common sans serif font such as Ariel Black Rounded, and perhaps even a monospaced font like Atkinson Hyperlegible, you give players options, allowing them to find a font that helps them to engage with your in game text more readably than only offering OpenDyslexic.
I realise I’m not purely talking about open source fonts here, and there are going to be some costs involved, and I recognise there will be additional testing that needs to take place to make sure all these new fonts fit and make sense in the game, but this is the gold standard that we should maybe be looking toward, rather than thinking that OpenDyslexic is the finish line.
Open Dyslexic is super helpful, I find it personally really useful, but we do need to raise the bar for dyslexic player accessibility beyond making Open Dyslexic the only font option that gets offered.
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