On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 10:56 AM, Cam Macdonell <[email protected]> wrote: > I checked out both those "style guides for dyslexia" linked in the article > and both include Arial as a recommended font as well. As was mentioned by > Sarah, one of the key aspect is serifs.
My understanding is typesetters recommend serifs fonts for all main body text in general and reserve sans-serif fonts for headings and titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif#Readability_and_legibility I would infer from this that resolution limited displays have created more use of sans-serif fonts due to rendering issues with the serifs themselves. The article lists Computer Modern in the list of good fonts despite the fact that it is a serif font. Possibly it is a good compromise then for people who want both. http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/sites/default/files/good_fonts_for_dyslexia_study.pdf Interesting that Arial out performed OpenDyslexic in pretty much every way. Also interesting is that there was a difference between Helvetica and Arial given that Arial is basically a rip off of Helvetica (created as a drop in replacement to avoid license fees). The strongest result seems to be that italics are pretty universal in making things hard to read. Finally, just to really stir the pot, apparently hard-to-read fonts actually make for better recall https://hbr.org/2012/03/hard-to-read-fonts-promote-better-recall Cheers! -Tyson PS: One concern I would have with these studies is that I don't see any attempt to tease out the effect of people having more experience at reading certain fonts. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
