As someone teaching their 4 year old to read right now, I don't buy it. The text is long on "friendly" and random stuff like that, but that's not what I'm looking for in a font for kids.

Just off the top of my head the "v" in there doesn't have a point on the bottom, which is one of the confusions my daughter has ("u" vs "v"). And I don't think the "n" needs the serif on the right foot, as that's not the "platonic" shape of a lower case N. I do appreciate that their lower case "a" is more like a handwritten one, as is the lower case "g".

I've been going through the Teach Your Child to Read[0] book, and it introduces a "learner-friendly" font, which actually helps. It has special glyphs for "th", for example, and other font tricks like making silent letters smaller, and different variants for the vowels depending on their sound. Eventually, those tricks are minimized and the kid is reading a normal font, though.

In other words, I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, but this font doesn't seem to be concretely designed in that way, and I'm put off by the vague "friendly" type stuff it seems to be focusing on.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...

> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.

As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).

In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.

But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.

For all their talk about how they think this will help kids read, I didn't see any evidence that they actually did any studies on whether or not this font has any affect at all.

I don't know about kids or reading disabilities, but it looks nice and does feel "friendly" to read. Having the ability to vary and animate a lot of parameters will certainly enable some neat web designs.

Edit: I'm poking at this and it seems like the only way to do the animation is via the font designer's library. I'll be a lot more excited when this is supported by more options.

Without the kid branding and the name "Kermit," which piggybacks off of cultural feelings for marketing, this feels more like just another font. I found the body text hard to read and didn't realize at first it was using the font.

I read a lot of books on my ereader and generally find the best comfort comes from bold text and some kind of serifs. I really blaze through my books though, so I don't know if that actually improves my comprehension or just makes it feel better to skim.