An AI Experiment with Fonts for Phonological Dyslexia
This is the kind of thing that would only happen at the Lake Nona Impact Forum.
It's 1 AM. I'm at the bar. I'm talking to someone about his child with dyslexia.
But this wasn't the stereotypical kind - letters flipping around. This was phonological dyslexia, where mapping speech sounds to written letters is the hard part. Vowels, especially, are where things break down.
There are fonts designed for dyslexia. They adjust weight, spacing, letter balance. But none of them really experiment with how vowels are treated inside words.
What if the font itself treated vowels differently?
Existing dyslexia fonts like OpenDyslexic do useful things: weighted bottoms to anchor letters, extra spacing to reduce crowding. But they treat every letter the same way.
For someone with phonological dyslexia, vowels are the core problem. What if the font itself made vowels visually distinct - not through color or highlighting, but through the shape and placement of the letterforms?
That was the question. And we were at a bar. So I decided to find out.
Built from the bar
I pulled out my phone, opened MobileVibe, and asked a Claude code agent to generate multiple experimental fonts - each one taking a different visual approach to vowels.
Within minutes, we had half a dozen working font variations. Each one takes a different approach to making vowels stand out.
The fonts
VoDy Small
Vowels rendered smaller than consonants.
VoDy Big
Vowels rendered larger.
VoDy High
Vowels shifted to a higher vertical position.
VoDy Space
Extra spacing around vowels.
VoDy Shaped
Vowels given distinct visual treatments.
The fonts are free to download. Try them with books, webpages, anything.
Watch the story
This is an experiment, not a claim
This isn't a claim that fonts solve dyslexia. There's no research behind these yet. It's an experiment born from a late-night conversation and built in minutes on a phone.
The hypothesis is simple: if vowels are the hardest part of reading for someone with phonological dyslexia, making them visually distinct might help. The only way to find out is to try.
Try it
You can preview and download all the fonts at vodyfont.brainpowertools.com.
If you know someone with phonological dyslexia, share this with them and see if any of these approaches make a difference.