Sinhala fonts and dyslexia. adopting latin script based research in to sinhala reading materials.

Abstract

Typefaces and fonts designed for the purpose of dyslexia and the dyslexic reader have increased over the recent years among scholars and designers due to the increase of literature on the disability and the development of research on the subject of typography. These research and designs are more focused towards the font’s visual characteristics such as the stroke variation, size, space etc. meanwhile the cases discussed are predominantly based on languages that use Latin script. Research related to Sinhala typeface and fonts related to dyslexia is rare even though there are reading material and learning aid composed with the Sinhala script. As a pinor research this paper aims to findout the most appropriate Sinhala font to increase reading performance of children with dyslexia. To achive this the research discusses literature on Latin fonts and typefaces that addresses dyslexia in comparision to Sinhala fonts and futher addresses ways of adopting Latin font based research to Sinhala fonts. This paper is compiled with secondary data gathered through a literature review and primary data was gathered through a qualitative analysis on the selected three Sinhala fonts’ and their characteristics to achieve the best parameters required for the reading performace test. As an outcome of this research it was identified that some concepts from Latin font based research such as increasing the legibility of letters by increased font size and spacing, could be adopted to Sinhala fonts despite the difference in the two scripts. However, it was further concluded that compared to phonological complexities of the languages, Sinhala dyslexic readers could benefit more from a visual solution such as type design. Hence, there is a need to further research and to identifying the visual parameters of Sinhala font that works best for dyslexic children. The findings of this research can be applied to learning aids for Sinhala dyslexic students. Moreover, it can be a guide for typographic design for reading disabilities in the future.