Svetlana Alekseeva’s lecture on the first testing of fonts for people with reading difficulties
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to an online lecture by Svetlana Alekseeva, Candidate of Philology. During the lecture, she will talk about the first tests of fonts for people with reading difficulties.
Between 5% and 15% of the world’s population has a reading disability or dyslexia. For the past few decades, phonological problems, such as difficulty in establishing letter-sound correspondences, have been thought to be the main cause of this disorder. There is a growing body of evidence that dyslexia is multifactorial. In particular, difficulties with visual processing of information may be the sole or additional cause of the disorder. To test this hypothesis, special fonts have been created: Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic for the Latin script; and LexiaD and Antidyslexia for the Cyrillic script. The first tests of these fonts have not shown unequivocally positive results. During our meeting, the lecturer will analyse the results of these trials and make suggestions as to why the researchers cannot find the desired effect.
Svetlana Alekseeva, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Cognitive Studies, Principal Investigator of the project "Visual text representation and linguistic processing: reading mechanisms in people with dyslexia" (2023-2024).
The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.