Ever wondered what it's like to have dyslexia?
UK designer Daniel Britton knew the feeling – but couldn't communicate it to others.
Diagnosed with dyslexia during his final year of university, Britton struggled with professors and peers who couldn't understand his learning disability and thought he wasn't paying attention or was lazy.
So he decided to create a font that would mimic the feeling of reading with dyslexia by slowing down the time it took for readers to decipher sentences.
"What this typeface does is break down the reading time of a non-dyslexic down to the speed of a dyslexic," Britton said on his website.
The font works by taking out key lines from every letter, making it more difficult to interpret words and sentences.
About 40 per cent of every letter has been removed, which, according to Britton, leads to a reading speed that feels about the same as reading with dyslexia.
Have a go at reading these sentences, written in the font Britton designed.
"I wanted to make non-dyslexic people understand what it is like to read with the condition and to recreate the frustration and embarrassment of reading everyday text and then in turn to create a better understanding of the condition," he said.
The font can't be downloaded for use yet, but Britton has started a crowdfunding campaign to create a "dyslexia awareness pack" that can be used by schools.
Dyslexia often goes undetected in the schooling system because of lack of awareness and even scepticism of the condition.
Dyslexia is defined as a learning disability where the main symptom is challenges with reading despite normal intelligence. It's estimated to affect about 10 per cent of the population, with different degrees of severity.
"If we can increase our understanding and give the correct help to these people just think how many more Richard Bransons, Elon Musks or Boyan Slats we can produce," said Britton.
The writing in the image above reads: This typography is not designed to recreate what it would be like to read to read [sic] if you were dyslexic, it is designed to simulate the feeling of reading with dyslexia by slowing the reading time of the viewer down to a speed of which someone who has dyslexia would read.
