A Word for struggling readers

When Klaus Krogh tried to read as a child, the words seemed to bounce on the page. Dyslexia made it challenging for him to work through a book, but it didn’t stifle Krogh’s love for a well-crafted font: At age 13, he created his own alphabet design and used it to write Bob Dylan’s name on his bedroom wall.

The Copenhagen, Denmark, native no ­longer struggles with dyslexia, but he’s still designing typefaces. He is the founder of the Højbjerg-based typographic firm 2K/Denmark and has designed typefaces for Bibles for nearly 40 years. His latest project, “Grace,” is a dyslexia-friendly typeface that Lifeway Christian Resources and Crossway are using in a string of new editions of the Bible for dyslexic youth and adults released last fall and winter.

“I was predestined to do what I’m doing,” says Krogh, now a bespectacled 73-year-old with a white beard worthy of Santa Claus.

The Grace typeface is the product of five years of testing and development through a collaboration between 2K/Denmark and Cambridge University’s research department. Among other things, it features bottom-­weighted letters with more thickness near the base to help children who see bouncy letters like Krogh used to.

The dyslexia-friendly Bibles add to a growing list of resources designed with struggling readers in mind. As many as 1 in 5 people have dyslexia, a learning disability with a broad range of symptoms. It often involves difficulty recognizing written words and their corresponding sounds, and sufferers might mix up the order of letters in a word, or confuse one letter with another. There’s little scientific consensus on why the problem occurs.

Jack Imbert-Terry, domestic sales and development manager at the U.K.-based Bible Society, says the problem can have spiritual consequences, not just educational ones: “There are people that have struggled with reading Scripture and as a consequence perhaps even struggled with their faith.”

The ESV Holy Bible: Dyslexia-Friendly Edition from Crossway features the Grace typeface. Crossway

That’s why in 2016 the Bible Society published a specially formatted edition of the Gospel of Luke, the first iteration of dyslexia-friendly Scripture. Last year, the publisher finished an edition of its Good News Bible translation in 27 small books, representing what the Bible Society calls the first physical collection of a Bible for dyslexic readers.

Secular publishing houses are concerned with accessibility too. While many dyslexia-­friendly resources focus on young readers, publishers seem to be expanding their offerings to older readers as well. Last year, Bloomsbury and Union Square and Co. (an imprint of Hachette Book Group) released dyslexia-friendly editions of bestsellers like Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House and (revised) classics like Pride and Prejudice.

Digital resources have been available for several years. OpenDyslexic, an open-source font, was released in 2011. The Bible App added OpenDyslexic in 2020.

Sandra Peoples, a disability ministry consultant for the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, finds the mounting list of digital and print resources encouraging. “We’ve come so far,” said Peoples, who had dyslexia as a child. “Just even having spell-check at our disposal is very different than it was when I was growing up.”

Efforts to introduce dyslexia-friendly printed Scripture are relatively new. According to Klaus Krogh, the Grace typeface makes the Crossway and Lifeway offerings unique.

To help those who struggle with visual processing, each letter in the Grace typeface has its own “makeup” or features that set the letters apart from one another, since characters like “b” and “d” can look very similar. Other aspects of the Bibles from Crossway and Lifeway include abbreviated line and paragraph lengths and clear, pastel-­tinted overlays to reduce visual strain. (The publishers’ Bible translations also differ from the Bible Society offerings: The Crossway Bibles use the English Standard Version, and the Lifeway editions feature the Christian Standard Bible.)

Eight-year-old Asher Ferguson hasn’t received a formal diagnosis of dyslexia, but Kristen, his mother, said learning takes him “a thousand times longer” than the average student.

Since Asher already had a Bible, he was surprised when Kristen ordered Lifeway’s Grace Bible for Kids for him in January. But Asher found the dyslexia-­friendly Bible easier to read. “The font choice that they made in this particular Bible is, I think, really strategic to help kids who have visual processing issues,” Kristin said.

The Bible Society’s Good News Bible books are formatted with a standard sans serif font meant to be easy to read. Like the Crossway and Lifeway publications, the Bible Society resources include additional space between lines and feature short paragraphs. But unlike the former, which have two columns of text per page, the Bible Society’s books have single columns and thicker pages in conformity with guidelines from the British Dyslexia Association, a group the Bible Society worked with to produce its series.

Dyslexia symptoms differ from person to person, so Krogh envisions customizable solutions. For example, let users set the makeup and heaviness of the Grace typeface and download a personalized version for themselves. A loose plan for that is already in the works, Krogh said, and he hopes to see it through.

“I’m a young man,” jokes Krogh. “Look at the Bible. How old did they get? Seven, eight hundred years? I’ve only started.”