Good Morning, Folks. I have to admit that I have never really considered the ramifications of Dyslexia on the readability of our blogs. I honestly did not think that folks with that particular impairment would be interested in reading blogs. However, I realized that was a deeply ableist statement when my girlfriend, who has dyslexia, attempted to read my blog, simply out of a desire to engage more with the things that are important to me. So as a result, you will notice some significant changes to the way that this blog looks today, from a font basis. I had known that Google had worked with various groups to create a dyslexia friendy font, to make things more readable. It turns out that at least in the case of my girlfriend, this works, and the text no longer “swims” around the screen for her.
Essentially, I have replaced my normal body font with one called Lexend provided by Google Fonts. There are multiple flavors of the font, and they all seem to work equally well. I considered swapping my headings over to Lexend Dexa, but it did not feel right. Bangers is the font that I use to match the artwork of the blog, and headings tend to be short enough not to really trigger the core problems of dyslexia. I am lucky in that I am using a paid theme called Generate Press, and they have the ability to swap to dynamic typography mode. So essentially, once I figured out how to turn this on, I was able to swap fonts in seconds. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the swap because it solves the problem and makes my blog more readable by those with dyslexia.
Mostly, I wanted to write up a quick post about this in case others are interested in making the swap. Chemo is kicking my ass, and I barely slept last night, so I am going to cut this morning’s post short and focus only on the font swap. I think it is probably worth the effort just to improve the readability of our blogs.