The best free dyslexia fonts, and what actually helps

If your child has dyslexia, someone has probably told you to change the font. There are special "dyslexia fonts", ordinary fonts that dyslexia charities recommend, and newer fonts designed to be easy to read. Most of them are free. This guide says where each one comes from, what it costs, what the research found, and which settings tend to matter more than the font itself. We checked each maker's own page this week.

The short answer

The two special dyslexia fonts that have been tested in controlled studies, OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie, did not make children read faster or more accurately than Arial. That doesn't mean a font change is useless. It means the font is rarely the main thing. Size, spacing and a calm background have better support, and you can change all of them in any font. If your child likes a particular font and reads more because of it, that's a good enough reason to keep it.

The fonts, compared

OpenDyslexic

The best-known dyslexia font, with heavy bottoms on each letter so they are harder to flip. Its website says it is free to use, under the SIL Open Font License, with no fees. In a small study of primary school children with dyslexia, OpenDyslexic gave no improvement in reading rate or accuracy compared with Arial and Times New Roman, and none of the children said they preferred it (Wery & Diliberto, 2017). We looked at the evidence in more detail in Does the OpenDyslexic font really help?

Best for: a child who says they like it. Try it for a week, then ask.

Dyslexie

A paid font designed specifically for readers with dyslexia. Its website would not load on the day we checked, so we can't tell you its current price or licence. It has the strongest test of any dyslexia font: 170 children with dyslexia read no faster or more accurately in Dyslexie than in Arial, a second experiment with 147 children found the same, and most children preferred Arial or Times New Roman (Kuster et al., 2018).

Best for: hard to recommend paying for, given that result.

Lexend

A family of fonts made by Dr Bonnie Shaver-Troup, an educational therapist, who worked with Google on it. Lexend's website offers it as a free, open-source download. Its idea is different from the dyslexia fonts: instead of changing letter shapes, it offers versions with progressively wider spacing. We found no controlled study of Lexend with children with dyslexia, so treat it as a well-made, readable font rather than a treatment.

Best for: a clean, modern font with spacing built in, for school documents and slides.

Atkinson Hyperlegible

Made by the Braille Institute for readers with low vision, so that letters that are easy to confuse (like I, l and 1) look clearly different. The Braille Institute says it is free for everyone, for personal and commercial use. It wasn't designed for dyslexia and hasn't been tested for it, but many readers find it comfortable.

Best for: a child who mixes up similar-looking letters and numbers.

Arial, Verdana and Comic Sans

Plain, familiar sans-serif fonts that most computers already have. Microsoft lists all three among the fonts available in Word and its other Microsoft 365 apps. Dyslexia Scotland's guidance recommends plain sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Verdana and Calibri, and says specialised dyslexia fonts are only worth using if the person finds them helpful. Arial is also the font that won on preference in the Dyslexie study.

Best for: most children, most of the time. Free, already installed, and the font teachers are most likely to use.

Settings that matter more than the font

Dyslexia Scotland's typed-format guidance suggests:

• Size: at least 12 point for print and screens. Bigger is fine.
• Letter and word spacing: increase the default spacing by around 30 to 35% of the font size, with word spacing well above letter spacing.
• Line spacing: 1.5.
• Background: off-white or a soft tint such as cream or peach, with dark text, rather than stark white.
• Avoid: italic, oblique and decorative fonts.

Spacing has its own research, which we covered in letter spacing and dyslexia. Shorter lines can help too.

How to set it up

• In Word: pick a plain font, set the size to 12 to 14, then use Paragraph settings for 1.5 line spacing and Font > Advanced to expand the character spacing.
• In Google Docs: set the font and size, then Format > Line and paragraph spacing.
• For anything else: paste the text into our free Easy reader. It lets you change the font (it uses the fonts already on your device, including Lexend or OpenDyslexic if you've installed them), size, letter and line spacing, tint the page, and follow one line at a time with a reading ruler. Nothing you paste leaves the page, and there's no account.
• For long reading: listening can do more than any font. Our free read-aloud tools guide compares the options.

A simple test at home

Print the same short page three ways: their usual font, Arial at 14 point with 1.5 spacing, and the special font they want to try. Let them read each one aloud on different days and ask which felt easiest. Their answer, and whether they read more, is the result that counts. If reading is still a struggle whatever the font, that's worth raising with the school; our signs of dyslexia guide covers what to look for.

For students revising for exams, our sister site has free study tools that work with any of these settings: the Versed blog.

References

• Wery, J. J., & Diliberto, J. A. (2017). The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy. Annals of Dyslexia, 67, 114-127.
• Kuster, S. M., van Weerdenburg, M., Gompel, M., & Bosman, A. M. T. (2018). Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 68, 25-42.
• Dyslexia Scotland. Dyslexia-friendly typed formats. dyslexiascotland.org.uk (read 23 October 2026).
• OpenDyslexic (opendyslexic.org), Lexend (lexend.com), Braille Institute Atkinson Hyperlegible (brailleinstitute.org/freefont), Microsoft cloud fonts in Office (support.microsoft.com), all read 23 October 2026.