Dr. Shaver-Troup, an educational therapist, realized that many of her patients had reading issues. This clear problem was masking the individuals’ true learning capabilities and undermining their intelligence. In 1999, this insight led to a theory developed one year later: Bonnie proposed that a patient’s reading performance—and consequently their learning potential—could be improved by creating the right typeface.
In 2000, Bonnie theorized that reading performance could be enhanced through the use of sans-serif fonts with expanded scaling and hyper-expansion of character spacing. But why?
Bonnie realized that specific typographical considerations could help people with dyslexia:
- Sans-serif fonts reduce cognitive noise
- Expanded scaling improves potential for charac…
Dr. Shaver-Troup, an educational therapist, realized that many of her patients had reading issues. This clear problem was masking the individuals’ true learning capabilities and undermining their intelligence. In 1999, this insight led to a theory developed one year later: Bonnie proposed that a patient’s reading performance—and consequently their learning potential—could be improved by creating the right typeface.
In 2000, Bonnie theorized that reading performance could be enhanced through the use of sans-serif fonts with expanded scaling and hyper-expansion of character spacing. But why?
Bonnie realized that specific typographical considerations could help people with dyslexia:
- Sans-serif fonts reduce cognitive noise
- Expanded scaling improves potential for character recognition
- Hyper-expansion of character spacing, creates a greater lag time and reduces potential crowding and masking effects
“We have a global reading crisis and we can change much of it by delivering fonts that are optimized for the visual field and for the individual. The answer is hidden in plain sight. It’s the font,” said Shaver-Troup.
During her time as an educational therapist in Silicon Valley, Bonnie Shaver-Troup worked with students facing challenges like dyslexia and other reading difficulties. She experimented with adjusting the spacing between letters in their reading materials and discovered that this simple change significantly enhanced their reading and comprehension abilities. Shaver-Troup concluded that the problem lay not in her students’ cognitive abilities but in the visual perception of the letterforms presented on paper or screens.
“The majority of the reading problems, including dyslexia, are not cognitive or phonological. They are visual or perceptual. Our testing has a built-in design flaw. We use fonts to deliver text for reading that are too tight for efficient or successful visual processing. Then we get poor results, suggesting the reading issue is phonological or cognitive. If we change the font to the tested optimized font fit, then we change the outcome,”