I want my illustrations to be easily read from a distance and not in any way confusing for those with dyslexia or any other reading or learning impairment.

I did quite alot of reading into fonts and type which children identified with easily. Some research suggested that Roman fonts were preferred by children but almost every study noted that sans serif fonts were highly successful in experiments. I need a font that is quite broad so I have sufficient space to illustrate within the borders of the letter shape.
Looking at existing successful alphabet chart illustrations, most of them use sans serif fonts and so I too will stick to sans serif with a bold look. Below are some of my favourite finds of illustrated fonts, these are all related to the english language but the visuals and styles are beautiful and successfully portray the animal/object relative to each letter.

After experiementing and revising over the look of many fonts, I chose the font' Lemon/Milk' which is a free font from Dafont.com although revising every letter I then decided to change some letters to the similar font Porter also from Dafont as they are more readable. After some consideration and feedback from others about which font they preferred, I was advised to stick solely with Porter, feedback was that the sharp points on letters such sa M, A, N etc in Lemon/Milk do not portray as friendly a feel as the squared off edges in that of Porters letter. Some letters in Porter looked entirely better in Porter and so I decided to solely stick to this font. I have included the full alphabet excluding letters x and q as these do not exist in the Swahili alphabet