Kermit: A typeface for kids – making reading easier

Summary

While we haven’t implemented automatic prosody yet, Kermit allows us to explore expressive writing to elevate comprehension for children and adults alike. Helping severe dyslexics Dyslexia is a very active area of research. Fifty years ago, people thought dyslexics saw letters backwards. Now, it’s primarily seen as a phonological problem in which dyslexics have difficulty with sounds in language. The most successful dyslexia programs to date focus on teaching phonemic awareness (e.g. that the spoken word “cat” has three sounds) and phonics (mapping letters to sounds). This success might make it seem like dyslexia is all about sounds, but it’s not clear yet if phonological problems are dyslexia’s cause. In 2010, researchers Trichur Vidyasagar and Kristen Pammer suggested a new theory on the cause of dyslexia: dyslexic brains might have issues with visuo-spatial processing. In other words, dyslexic brains may process visual information differently, making the order of letters unclear and reading difficult. To understand this, let’s take a trip inside your brain. Light enters your eyes and shines on the retina. The retina processes the light, sending neural signals on a long journey from your eyes to the back of your head where your brain processes images, forwarding them through the visual cortex. This journey takes two parallel paths: the high road and the low road, literally. The high road, or dorsal pathway, physically runs along the top path through your brain, carrying information about where things are, such as the sky is up, pavement is down, or the order of letters on a page. It is the “where” signal. The low road, or ventral pathway, runs below the high road, carrying information about what objects are, e.g. the blue thing is the sky, the grey thing, pavement, and the two lines leaning against each other with a crossbar is an A. It is the “what” signal. These two roads meet at a little neural town called the Visual Wordform Area, which combines the “what” and...