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Dyslexia is one of the most common Specific Learning Disabilities (SLDs) that mainly affects the development of literacy and language related skills. According to Snowling (2013), dyslexia is a SLD affecting reading and writing skills and impacts an estimated 5-10% of population. Dyslexia has been described by (Lyon, Shaywitz, & Shaywitz, 2003) as a ‘SLD that is neurobiological in origin and it is characterized by poor word recognition, spelling and decoding abilities despite having higher cognitive abilities and receiving effective classroom experience’. Dyslexia makes individuals unable, despite their experience in the classroom, to acquire the language techniques that would enable them to learn to read and to write. This disorder affects also speed and accuracy in reading. It often leads to an inaccurate reading that affects comprehension and makes reading task extremely difficult. Dyslexia is mainly characterized by difficulties in reading and writing related to deficits in phonological, orthographic, visual and semantic processing during the identification of words. It includes hesitant and labored reading with a low level of comprehension, confusion between different sounds in words, substitution of sounds, failure to recognize familiar words, attention difficulties, missing lines, adding or omitting extra words into texts and increased fatigue.
Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the use of ICT in education to support children with SLDs (Sidhu & Manzura, 2011) (Benmarrakchi et al., 2015, 2017a, 2017b). Some studies highlight the need for dyslexic-friendly fonts in digital and printed books such as Dyslexie (Leeuw, 2010), Opendyslexic1, Sylexiad (Hillier, 2008) and read regular2. In a study carried out by Bachmann & Mengheri (2018) to assess the significance of EasyReading which is a specific reading font designed especially for dyslexia. A total of 533 students were assessed based on reading tasks presented with two different fonts Times New Roman and EasyReading. The reading test was conducted in Italian. The results showed a statistically relevant difference between the performances. EasyReading resulted in a positive impact on reading fluency.
Similar studies can be found in the work of Leeuw (2010) who examined the difference in reading speed and accuracy between dyslectics and normal readers, while reading printed words and non-words using the fonts Dyslexie and Arial. The researcher conducted a word reading test with 21 Dutch students with dyslexia. The results indicated that neither the dyslectics nor the normal readers did increase their reading speed significantly while reading the words on the EMT and Klepel using Dyslexie. However, Dyslexie did not lead to faster reading, but could help with some dyslexic-related errors in Dutch.
Further, a study done by Marinus et al. (2016) was conducted to examine if Dyslexie font is indeed more effective than a commonly used sans serif font Arial. The main objective of this study was to test the efficacy of this font for English students with reading impairments, and to investigate if the positive effect of Dyslexie could be explained by its particular spacing settings. The outcomes indicated that reading performance of individuals with reading impairments decline if letters and words are presented closely together. Also, they indicated that the expanded spacing between letters increases reading speed for reading impaired children. However, when the spacing settings for Arial are matched to Dyslexie, the advantage disappears. Therefore, the benefit of Dyslexie seems to stem fully from its specific spacing settings. It can simply change the font’s spacing settings, instead of altering the shape of the letters. The outcome of this study confirmed what was found by Zorzi et al. (2012) and other researchers (Perea et al., 2012) about the positive effect of increased letter spacing on the reading performance of children with dyslexia.