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Jean Thanks for Graham's address. I wrote him a note and had a long conversation yesterday. I find his argument convincing although very much against the conventional wisdom: basically there are fewer ambiguities and confusibles in upper case than lower. So where people are decoding letter by letter rather than word by word, capitals are easier, and word shape is irrelevant. He also argues that counter shape (by which I think he means the enclosed shapes) are very important for disambiguation (which similarly goes against the longer ascenders and descenders argument of Sassoon). The problem with his approach, to my mind, is the unacceptability, for public consumption, of caps, even small caps. I'm trying to persuade him to look, also, at modifications to the ordinary l/c alphabet to remove the ambiguities/confusions, so that he has a two-prong solution. Don't the virtues of Sassoon mostly apply to the flash-card, word-as-a-whole-recognition school of teaching reading, rather than the analytical, phonic based school of the dyslexia world? Graham has just finished his Masters (I think he said he got a distinction!) and is trying to get funding to finish designing a font. But he doesn't really want to spend another 3 years doing a PhD. (and I wouldn't want to wait 3 years for the results. . .). Do you have any ideas for charitable/research money that would enable him to finish? I think what he is doing is potentially very valuable, and am keen to help. I'm copying this to dis-forum a) because of the interest in fonts and b) in case anybody from academia has any ideas on funding. Regards Ian Litterick You wrote: I had an enquiry from a researcher into fonts for dyslexic adults. I will send Ian Litterick the name and address. He found that they liked sans serif fonts and unjustified lines which both make sense - but wait for it: he found that they read capitals more easily than lower-case or mixed case, and is designing a font using all capitals, but with capital capitals bigger than those used for the rest of the word. This goes against all our received wisdom about ascenders and descenders making words distinctive. Road signs are now in mixed case. Comics are in mixed case. I was always surprised that dyslexic children could read words in capitals. Many dyslexic adults write in capitals, some because they have been told to by employers etc. because it is easier to for the employers to read; some because they do not know how to join lower-case letters. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%