Saba Said Al Busaidi – Senior Manager Corporate Affairs at Omantel speaks to Communicate about Maqroo, dyslexia, and WhatsApp
Dyslexia is often misunderstood and children who have it are often misdiagnosed and tend to perform poorly in class accordingly, how will Maqroo font help students in that perspective?
Dyslexia remains a largely overlooked topic across the Middle East. Although awareness is gradually increasing, many people with dyslexia still struggle to discuss it due to a lack of understanding. This is especially true for the Arabic language, which 86.4 million dyslexic individuals depend on, yet until recently, there was no Arabic dyslexic-friendly font to assist them. Recognizing this need, Omantel developed Maqroo—the first Arabic dyslexic-friendly font—and launched maqroo.com, making Arabic more inclusive.
To ensure the success of this initiative, we collaborated with Arabic typeface designers and analyzed all 650 Arabic fonts with the dyslexic community to understand how they perceive fonts. We increased the size of noqat (dots) and tashkeel (glyphs) by 200% and designed each letter to be distinctively recognizable through their irregularities. The font was also coded to increase the height of the letters and make the inner spaces irregular for better readability.
Maqroo was made available on maqroo.com and quickly became a hit within different communities. To date, it has been downloaded over 23,000 times, aiding many. Supported by a targeted social media campaign, the font was made available on the International Day of People of Determination, December 3, 2023, symbolizing our commitment to simplifying communication for everyone.
How can children or even adults who are diagnosed with dyslexia benefit from the font you created?
Arabic, a language relied upon by 86.4 million dyslexic individuals, lacked a dyslexic-friendly font until the creation of Maqroo. Dyslexia—a lifelong condition affecting reading, writing, spelling, and speaking—is often misunderstood, particularly its impact on children. Despite extensive researches, this was the first time an organization tackles the challenges presented by the Arabic language, especially given the similarity between many Arabic letters, which differ only by a dot.
Reading can be harder and slower for dyslexic individuals, leading them to read less and potentially fall behind academically. This creates a gap between their reading level and intellectual capacity, which can discourage them from reading altogether. To address this, we worked on making Arabic letters with dots easier and different, enabling dyslexic children to better link shapes to their pronunciations.
People often confuse the terms "disabled" and "handicapped," which can lead to society not helping a disabled person. Do you think your font will be a way to integrate such people into an enabled society?
Absolutely. Maqroo is a step toward breaking barriers and integrating dyslexic individuals into a society where they can thrive without being labeled or marginalized. By making Arabic more accessible, Maqroo challenges preconceived notions of disability and creates a practical tool that empowers rather than isolates. This initiative promotes the idea of an enabled society where everyone, regardless of their challenges, has equal opportunities to learn, communicate, and contribute.
The success of this campaign falls under Omantel’s social responsibility strategy which promotes a number of initiatives that help certain segments of the society and address social issues and challenges. Social responsibility is key component of Omantel strategy and hence the Company attaches great importance to helping needy segments in the society and encourage its employees to play a key role in initiatives and programs carried out or adopted by Omantel.
You have won spectacularly lately in award shows, which brings your other Maqroo campaign—the WhatsApp Oman. What can you tell us about it and how it is resonating with the public at large?
All across Oman, millions of Omantel customers wake up to "Good Morning" messages on WhatsApp groups featuring cliché pictures of scenery, flowers, and sunrises. Omantel decided to revolutionize this morning social routine with a nationwide PR campaign executed entirely on WhatsApp by creating "Good Morning" greetings that replaced cliché images with beautiful scenery, sunrises, and flowers from Oman's undiscovered hotspots, sending them directly to our entire database of 3.8 million customers.
Our target audience comprised everyone in Oman with an Omantel number and WhatsApp account. Our objective was to foster brand love and establish Omantel as the leading technology services provider that cares about Oman and its people. We launched a word-of-mouth PR campaign using an easily accessible database of numbers to directly target the entire country with Omantel-branded messages, celebrating Oman's hidden beauty.
To execute the campaign, we used an AI image recognition to analyze millions of "Good Morning" messages on social and digital platforms and classified them into categories like mountains, oceans, sunrises, sunsets, flowers, and beaches. We sourced images from photographers, tourism databases, and our own archives to create messages featuring scenery from all 61 provinces across Oman's 11 governorates. Each message included unique dialects and sayings, and every image was geo-tagged with the exact location to inspire people to visit.
With minimal costs for image sourcing and editing and no media spend, we reached a captive audience of 3.8 million people. This resulted in a 230% growth in Omantel's WhatsApp channel traffic and a 29% increase in positive mentions on social media. The campaign also reconnected Omanis with their country's beauty, leading to a 37% increase in domestic tourism and a 300% rise in traffic to the VisitOman website. WhatsApp Oman has become the new, most talked-about morning ritual for Omanis nationwide.
