Saturday, April 18, 2015

State of the Reading:: Open Dyslexic Added to Overdrive!


Overdrive's last update came with something really special. Really awesome. Instead of just cleaning up the interface a bit and squashing a few bugs, they added Open Dyslexic as one of their font options. Needless to say, I'm thrilled.

I wasn't diagnosed as mildly dyslexic until I was an adult. Probably because I was such an avid reader that I developed myriad coping mechanisms. Primarily my issue isn't dyslexia; it's dyscalculia, but sometimes letters give me quite a lot of difficulty.

And I didn't realize just how much difficulty until Overdrive (the standard platform for library eBooks) added the only opensource, free, font to help people with dyslexia better distinguish letters. Before Open Dyslexic there were a few fonts, but they were really expensive, so they tended not to get much use.

When I'm using Open Dyslexic, I'm not having to constantly reread sections because I've gotten them out of order. I don't have to constantly backtrack. I can just read the book. Which is pretty phenomenal.

If you want to try out Overdrive, head to their website and see if one of your public libraries is listed. You can also use their reader app for any epub books, not just library eBooks. If you want to help out the Open Dyslexic Font project, there are a myriad of ways you can share your skills on their website.

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