Reading Tips
Literacy Development
What actually helps a child with dyslexia read?
Published on 9/10/2026
6 min read
If your child has just been identified as dyslexic, or you have started to wonder, you will find no shortage of things to buy. Coloured overlays, tinted lenses, special fonts, apps with the word dyslexia in the title. Some of it helps. Most of the evidence is thinner than the packaging, and the single most popular fix has now been tested several times and does nothing at all.
The famous fix is the one that does not work
Dyslexia fonts are designed on a reasonable-sounding idea: make the letters heavier at the bottom and more distinct from each other, and they will be harder to confuse. It looks like it should work.
Wery and Diliberto (2016) tested OpenDyslexic — the free font most apps use, ours included — against plain Arial and Times New Roman with twelve children aged 9 to 12 who had a confirmed diagnosis. It produced no improvement in reading rate or accuracy, and on several measures the ordinary fonts came out ahead. None of the children said they preferred it.
Twelve children is a small study, and on its own it would settle nothing. But Kuster and colleagues (2017) ran a much larger one: 170 children with dyslexia read the same passages in a dyslexia typeface and in Arial. They read them no faster and made a comparable number of mistakes. Most preferred Arial. In a second experiment, roughly one child in nine picked the dyslexia font over the two ordinary ones.
The researchers' conclusion is worth quoting for how flat it is: the font neither benefits nor impedes reading.
Wery and Diliberto (2016) tested OpenDyslexic — the free font most apps use, ours included — against plain Arial and Times New Roman with twelve children aged 9 to 12 who had a confirmed diagnosis. It produced no improvement in reading rate or accuracy, and on several measures the ordinary fonts came out ahead. None of the children said they preferred it.
Twelve children is a small study, and on its own it would settle nothing. But Kuster and colleagues (2017) ran a much larger one: 170 children with dyslexia read the same passages in a dyslexia typeface and in Arial. They read them no faster and made a comparable number of mistakes. Most preferred Arial. In a second experiment, roughly one child in nine picked the dyslexia font over the two ordinary ones.
The researchers' conclusion is worth quoting for how flat it is: the font neither benefits nor impedes reading.
The boring fix is the one that does
Here is the finding that deserved the attention the fonts got.
Zorzi and colleagues (2012) took 94 dyslexic children — 54 in Italy, 40 in France, aged 8 to 14 — and changed one thing. They spread the letters out. Nothing else: same text, same typeface, just more air between the characters.
The children read about 20% faster and made half as many mistakes. There was no training and no practice period. The improvement was there the first time they saw the wider text.
The reason is a thing called crowding. Letters sitting close together interfere with each other, and it takes effort to pull one out from its neighbours — effort that dyslexic readers have to spend far more of. Give each letter room and some of that cost simply disappears.
You do not need to buy anything for this. Every e-reader, phone and browser already does it.
Zorzi and colleagues (2012) took 94 dyslexic children — 54 in Italy, 40 in France, aged 8 to 14 — and changed one thing. They spread the letters out. Nothing else: same text, same typeface, just more air between the characters.
The children read about 20% faster and made half as many mistakes. There was no training and no practice period. The improvement was there the first time they saw the wider text.
The reason is a thing called crowding. Letters sitting close together interfere with each other, and it takes effort to pull one out from its neighbours — effort that dyslexic readers have to spend far more of. Give each letter room and some of that cost simply disappears.
You do not need to buy anything for this. Every e-reader, phone and browser already does it.
What to change tonight
All of these are free, all take about a minute, and all work on the same principle: give the letters room.
| Change | Why it helps | Where to do it |
|---|---|---|
| More space between letters | The change with the clearest evidence behind it | Letter-spacing or tracking in any reader app |
| More space between words | Same reason — fewer neighbours competing for attention | Word spacing at roughly a quarter of a character width |
| More space between lines | Stops the eye dropping into the line below mid-sentence | Line height around 1.8 |
| Fewer words on each line | Less distance to track across, fewer places to lose the thread | Narrow the column, or turn a tablet upright |
| Larger text | Spacing grows with it, and it costs nothing | The font-size control you already have |
Telling dyslexia apart from still learning English
This is where families like ours get it wrong, and we manage it in both directions at once.
Colorado's Department of Education puts it plainly in its dyslexia handbook: dyslexia is an equal opportunity reading problem, and children learning English are exactly as likely to have it as anyone else. Yet those same children are identified far later than their English-only classmates — and are also, at the same time, often placed in special education when they have no disability at all.
So the most useful question a parent can ask is this: does the difficulty show up in their first language too? If your child has had schooling in it, dyslexia will be visible there as well. A struggle that exists only in English is far more likely to be English.
Colorado's Department of Education puts it plainly in its dyslexia handbook: dyslexia is an equal opportunity reading problem, and children learning English are exactly as likely to have it as anyone else. Yet those same children are identified far later than their English-only classmates — and are also, at the same time, often placed in special education when they have no disability at all.
So the most useful question a parent can ask is this: does the difficulty show up in their first language too? If your child has had schooling in it, dyslexia will be visible there as well. A struggle that exists only in English is far more likely to be English.
What doesn't work
- Buying the thing with the word on the box. Coloured overlays, tinted lenses and special fonts all sell well and none of them has the evidence that the spacing research has. Spend the money on books instead.
- More reading, harder. Volume on text that fights them builds avoidance rather than fluency. If a page is a battle, the page is wrong, not the child.
- Treating it as effort. Dyslexic children are usually working harder than their classmates, not less hard. Being told to concentrate is both wrong and demoralising.
- Waiting for it to sort itself out. Reading difficulties respond well to being taught properly and respond to very little else. The Education Endowment Foundation rates systematic phonics as very extensively evidenced for early reading, and it is the thing a specialist teacher will reach for first.
When to worry, and when not to
Dyslexia is common, it says nothing about how clever a child is, and it responds well to the right teaching. Very little about this is an emergency.
Worth raising with your child's teacher: still confusing letters that look alike well past the start of the second school year; difficulty hearing rhyme, or breaking a spoken word into its separate sounds, at six or older; reading that is accurate but so effortful that a short passage exhausts them; or spelling that stays wildly unpredictable while everything else progresses.
Ask for an assessment rather than a label from the internet. And if your family speaks another language at home, say so at the start — whether the difficulty appears in that language is one of the more useful things an assessor can know. We cannot diagnose anything, and neither can any app.
Worth raising with your child's teacher: still confusing letters that look alike well past the start of the second school year; difficulty hearing rhyme, or breaking a spoken word into its separate sounds, at six or older; reading that is accurate but so effortful that a short passage exhausts them; or spelling that stays wildly unpredictable while everything else progresses.
Ask for an assessment rather than a label from the internet. And if your family speaks another language at home, say so at the start — whether the difficulty appears in that language is one of the more useful things an assessor can know. We cannot diagnose anything, and neither can any app.
A small note on StorySparkle
We ship a dyslexia-friendly reading mode, and after an article like this we should say plainly what it does. It switches the text to OpenDyslexic, and it opens the text up — wider letter spacing, word spacing at a quarter of a character, line height 1.8.
On the evidence above, the second half is doing the work and the first half has none. We keep the font because some children like how it looks, and a child who will sit down and read beats a typeface that tests well. You should know which half is which.
What we are not: a dyslexia intervention, an assessment, or a substitute for structured phonics teaching. That comes from a school or a specialist. And if it is only the spacing you want, you do not need us — every e-reader and browser does it free.
Where we fit is the practice afterwards, with stories graded on our SESL© scale, which measures how hard a text actually is to read. If you are unsure what your child is stuck on, our guide to what develops when separates getting words off the page from understanding them, reading aloud together is the habit underneath all of it, and our levelled library is sorted by difficulty.
On the evidence above, the second half is doing the work and the first half has none. We keep the font because some children like how it looks, and a child who will sit down and read beats a typeface that tests well. You should know which half is which.
What we are not: a dyslexia intervention, an assessment, or a substitute for structured phonics teaching. That comes from a school or a specialist. And if it is only the spacing you want, you do not need us — every e-reader and browser does it free.
Where we fit is the practice afterwards, with stories graded on our SESL© scale, which measures how hard a text actually is to read. If you are unsure what your child is stuck on, our guide to what develops when separates getting words off the page from understanding them, reading aloud together is the habit underneath all of it, and our levelled library is sorted by difficulty.
One last thing
Open the settings on whatever your child is reading from, push the spacing and the text size up until the page looks almost too airy, and hand it back. It costs nothing, it takes a minute, and on the evidence it will do more than anything you can buy this week.
About the author
Written by StorySparkle's reading team — a group that includes qualified English language teachers and a specialist in second-language reading assessment, and which built the SESL© levelling scale behind our library. We write for families raising readers in more than one language.
Updated September 2026. Every study linked here was checked at the time of writing.
Updated September 2026. Every study linked here was checked at the time of writing.