Zuntold · Research + Design
An evidence-synthesis and practitioner toolkit mapping research on TTS, letter spacing, line length, font choice, and syllabification — organized by evidence strength. Also includes a flow theory framework for understanding why format disrupts the reading experience for dyslexic minds.
For dyslexic readers, the barrier to deep reading is rarely comprehension — it's the format. Standard typographic defaults keep the evaluating mind in charge: decoding letter shapes, tracking lines, managing visual noise. The cognitive cost of reading is so high that there's no room left for meaning, let alone flow.
Teachers and accessibility specialists know this intuitively, but the research landscape is fragmented — scattered across journals in education, cognitive science, typography, and HCI, with varying evidence quality.
A practitioner-facing toolkit that synthesizes research on the most common format interventions for dyslexic readers, organized by evidence strength:
The toolkit also includes a framework grounded in Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory: when the perceptual cost of reading exceeds the reader's skill level, the result is anxiety — not engagement. For dyslexic readers, format interventions don't make reading "easier" in a reductive sense. They restore the balance between challenge and skill that makes flow possible.
The goal isn't to remove difficulty from reading. It's to ensure the difficulty is in the right place — in the meaning, not in the mechanics.