Borel

Suzanne Borel-Maisonny was a French pioneer of speech therapy, and the font named for her was made with speech therapists in the room. Rosalie Wagner started it in 2017 at the ANRT, the post-master research program in Nancy, together with teachers, around a single question: what should letters look like when a child is learning to read and to write at the same time?

The trouble sits in the cursive taught in French primary schools. Its ascenders are very tall against a small x-height, which works against legibility at the size children practice at, and that is hard on every beginner, harder still on those with learning disabilities. Borel keeps to the school conventions and pulls the strokes toward ordinary typographic structures known to read well. Low contrast, a generous x-height, open letters that are hard to mistake for each other.

The glyph set was kept small on purpose. It covers 12 languages, Catalan, Danish, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese, and anything else on the same alphabet; Wagner takes requests for more through the project’s issue tracker. 2 stylistic sets and contextual alternates come with it.

For a reading primer or a worksheet for 6 year olds we would pick Borel over any decorative script. It sets wide, so leave room on the page.