A twenty-five year-old graphic designer has created a font to help people understand the frustration of living with dyslexia.
A specific learning difficulty which makes it hard for some people to learn to read, write and spell correctly, dyslexia is a reality for up to 10 per cent of the Irish population.
Daniel Britton’s typeface, based on Helvetica, is designed to recreate the feeling and emotion of dyslexia, slowing the reader down and making it frustratingly difficult to decipher the words – something he struggled with himself as long as he can remember.
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The paragraph above reads: ‘This typography is not designed to recreate what it would be like to read to read if you were dyslexic it is designed to simulate the feeling of reading with dyslexia by slowing the reading time of the viewer down to a speed of which someone who has dyslexia would read’
“I was diagnosed when I was young as a partial-dyslexic, but no one understood it,” Daniel told the Daily Mail.
“I remember when I was eight-years-old, all I got was try harder, read harder, you’re lazy, you’re stupid, you’re thick.
“I needed to stimulate and recreate the frustration, the embarrassment and the outright effort it is to read the daily type.”
The font, named ‘Dyslexia’ has landed Daniel, from Kent (pictured below), a job with a dyslexia awareness group in the UK Parliament.
For more information on dyslexia and the supports available, visit the Dyslexia Association of Ireland.
