LexiaD, the first dyslexia-specific Cyrillic compared to the popular Times New Roman and when read by adolescents

Svetlana Alexeeva 1 Vladislav Zubov 2 1Institute for Cognitive Studies, St.Petersburg State University, St.Petersburg, Russia, [email protected]

2Ludmila Verbitskaya Department of General Linguistics, St.Petersburg State University, St.Petersburg, Russia

Introduction Readability testing with a mobile Around 10% of the people have dyslexia, a neurological disability that im- eye-tracker pairs a person’s ability to read and write. Text presentation can be an important factor regarding the reading performance of people with dyslexia. Participants: 72 students of grades 8-10 (14-17 y.o.) without dyslexia. A bunch of Latin-based dyslexia-friendly fonts were designed: The previous study (Alexeeva et al., 2020) did not find difference between , , , . school children with and without dyslexia regarding the font effect. Despite assurances of the authors about positive effects of the fonts on read- Materials: Three connected texts about Easter Island from the Pro- ing performance of dyslexics, the first empirical studies failed to prove it: gramme for International Student Assessment manual (2020). OpenDyslexic (Wery and Diliberto, 2017; Rello and Baeza-Yates, 2013), Design: Each text in a different font: LexiaD (16 pt) / TNR (13 pt)/ Dyslexie (Kuster et al., 2018). Roboto (14 pt); physical font height was equal; order of fonts was random Recently, The Cyrillic font, LexiaD, has been developed for Russian- for each student. speaking people with dyslexia. Its key feature is reduction of inter-letter The title of the third text in LexiaD, TNR and Roboto (Did the Polynesian similarity of the Russian alphabet that was objectively measured in a pretest rats destroy Rapanui’s trees?): eye-tracking experiment (Alexeeva and Konina, 2016). In previous studies, LexiaD has demonstrated advantages over modern, highly rated by font ex- perts, but relatively unfamiliar PT Sans and PT Serif fonts when read by primary school children with and without dyslexia (Alexeeva et al., 2020). Objective Equipment: eye-tracker (glasses) Pupil Core (sample rate — 200 Hz) Statistical analysis: a linear mixed-effects model analysis for mean fix- In this study, LexiaD was compared to well-known fonts – Times New Ro- ation duration in R with font (TNR vs. LexiaD, vs. Roboto) as a fixed man (TNR) and Roboto (the font of the Google applications, similar to effect. The chi-square test for the subjective preference variables. ) when read printed versions of the texts by adolescents (readers with Results a considerable reading experience compared to primary school children). LexiaD, the first dyslexia-specific Cyrillic font A holoalphabetic sentence in LexiaD:

LexiaD specification:

Conclusion Results showed a significant decrease in mean fixation duration while read- ing in LexiaD. Therefore, LexiaD proved faster to read and could be con- sidered to be a facilitating font. How did we found inter-letter similarities? (a pretest eye- References tracking experiment) Svetlana Alexeeva and Alena Konina. Crowded and uncrowded perception of cyrillic letters in parafoveal vision: confusion matrices based on error rates. We registered (a) incorrect responses to every Russian letter after its brief Paper presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception 2016, Barcelona, Spain, 2016. Svetlana Alexeeva, Aleksandra Dobrego, and Vladislav Zubov. Towards the first dyslexic font in russian. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on (parafoveal) presentation, (b) constructed a confusion matrix and (c) finally Linguistic and Neurocognitive Resources, pages 9–14, 2020. conducted cluster analysis to identify groups of similar letters. Sanne M Kuster, Marjolijn van Weerdenburg, Marjolein Gompel, and Anna MT Bosman. Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia. Annals of dyslexia, 68(1):25–42, 2018. Luz Rello and Ricardo Baeza-Yates. Good fonts for dyslexia. In Proceedings of the 15th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on computers Acknowledgements and accessibility, page 14. ACM, 2013. Jessica J Wery and Jennifer A Diliberto. The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, opendyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy. Annals of dyslexia, 67(2): Supported by Presidential grant for young scientists NoMK-1373.2020.6. 114–127, 2017.