On Jan 8, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Jeff Seager wrote: > For me, perceived legibility is important because I serve users with > visual impairments that range from peripheral vision loss to total > blindness.
The issue though is that "perceived legibility" is determined by the total of all typographic settings, which includes leading, kerning, color, rivers, line length, contrast and even composition rules... plus other variables tossed into the mix as well. Testing only the "type face" is effectively useless. This report uses a false premise as the basis for it's findings. As result, the report itself is pretty much useless. It's like the old research rule: Garbage data in, garbage data out. (Or something to that effect.) > Less than half of the study has any merit from my point of view, but > those bits may be worth knowing. This type of report is actually more harmful than helpful because those that conducted it seem to understand little about the topic they are researching. It's worse that they put it out there so that others who may not know better derive inappropriate conclusions from it. > Based on some experience with low-vision users, I don't > think the "perceived legibility" results would change much unless we > added another font designed specifically for people with impaired > vision. As far as I know, that font doesn't yet exist. We have plenty of type faces to work with. Even Arial as a web font is tolerable if inelegant from a typographic point of view. But it's not the font face that's the problem. It's the typography, or lack or proper typographic elegance, as implemented in the design of most digital products that impacts legibility, perceived or otherwise. I highly recommend Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style." It's a thousand times more valuable than this poorly conducted research study. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
