> "Would serif vs sans-serif fonts help kids distinguish b vs d? Which do you use?"
In Mentava, we start with Lexend font (sans-serif font designed to support dyslexics and struggling readers) and then introduce serif fonts later.
Using visual cues as training wheels makes a lot of sense, but I wouldn't want to use font serifs, because we don't want kids to learn to rely on them as a crutch. Instead, we want to use supports that we can fade out over time.
For example, when kids begin learning digraphs, they need to learn to process "th" as a single unit, rather than splitting into "t" and "h".
This is a difficult skill, because they've been used to looking at and reading one single letter at a time. Now there's a new dependency: the sound a letter makes changes based on what letter follows it!
To help kids parse words correctly, we colorcode digraphs to make them more obvious (see image). The nice thing about colorcoding as a support is that we can fade it out, like training wheels.
We begin with bright colors, then fade to dim colors, then fade to shades of greyscale, and eventually when the child has mastered the digraph, we can remove the support entirely.
For us, the key question when deciding on additional supports is: Are we capable of teaching this skill quickly?
If yes, we just get the student to mastery as quickly as possible and move on.
If it's a skill that's going to take a long time to master, then we build in additional supports.
For telling "b" and "d" apart, we still believe that we can get kids to a mastery level fairly quickly. So we don't add in extra supports, just extra practice.
But if it turns out we're wrong and kids need additional supports then we would probably build them out using color rather than serifs.