2026 Award Recipient
JacobShoag
Project Dyslex-Kriyah
Project Dyslex-Kriyah
Jacob is the founder of Dyslex-Kriyah, an initiative dedicated to making Hebrew texts accessible to people with dyslexia through the first-ever dyslexia-friendly Hebrew and Aramaic font.
Jacob has dyslexia, and growing up going to Orthodox Jewish school, he dreaded being called on in class to read aloud or lead prayers. To pass Talmud exams, he memorized pages of dense, unvoweled text—a workaround that left him feeling disconnected from his tradition. Everything changed for Jacob when he discovered Christian Boer’s Dyslexie font for English and asked himself why nothing similar existed for Hebrew. With encouragement from his AP Research teacher, he set out to build it himself.
Dyslex-Kriyah applies established dyslexia-friendly design principles to the distinct challenges of the Hebrew alphabet: heavier baselines to reduce letter inversions, distinctive letterforms to prevent common confusions, and increased spacing to reduce visual crowding. Jacob validated the font’s effectiveness through a trial with more than 230 participants and published his findings in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Education & Literacy Studies.
Jacob has made Dyslex-Kriyah entirely free and open-source, distributing formatted materials through his website. It is now used in more than 100 Jewish day schools internationally. Ohio State University has adopted it as an official accommodation in its Hebrew program.
The first dyslexia-friendly Hebrew and Aramaic font, designed to make Hebrew language and Jewish texts accessible to students and readers with dyslexia.
