Don’t Believe The Type!
Gareth Ford Williams, BBC
David Bailey, BBC
Bruno Maag, Typeface designer
"Emotional accessibility"
- Is it appealing? Technical and functional aspects are meaningless if no one wants to use your product/tool
- Typeface = "visual tone of voice" and has a large bearing on emotional a11y
Readability group survey
- looking at series of fonts to see which they find most readable (also had people remove reading glasses if they use them)
- cognitive bias: we might find fonts used in system UIs and commonly used fonts easier to read just because we're used to seeing them
- 2022 user sessions, every font viewed 16,800 times
- Segments for participants: confident readers, glasses for reading, pinch-to-zoom user, larger font, colored text, farsightedness, dyslexia & similar characteristics
Font selection rate: all participants
- Open dyslexic, Comic Sans, Times new Roman selected least frequently
- Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto slab, etc did moderately well
- SF Pr, Segoe UI, BBC Reith Sans, Verdana selected most often
- But none of the fonts scored more than 70%
- How do we know people are choosing for readability and not aesthetics? We'd probably see no difference b/t those with dyslexia and those who don't have it
Font selection rate: Dyslexic traits
- Open Dyslexic, Dyslexie, Comic Sans MS performed better among dyslexic folks but they were still selected least frequently
- Helvetica, Roboto, Segoe UI, and SF Pro selected less often (5-10%) among dyslexic people
Poor near vision group
- Times New Roman and Helvetica see largest drop
Letter combos used to find issues
- "rn"in words like kernel, furnished, surname
Why some typefaces work better than other
- Top 4 performers: San Francisco Pro, Segoe UI, Verdana, BBC Reith Sans
- All sans serif, either grotesque or humanist
- Grotesque: closed character shapes - stroke terminal loops back into character
- Humanist: open character shapes - more akin to movement of handwriting (more distinction b/t shapes like c, e, and o)
- Why does Helvetica not perform well? Probably because of tight letter spacing
- Why does Ubuntu fall short even though it has hallmarks of humanist design? Font weight is stronger than other similar fonts, maybe just outside acceptable parameters. Or maybe it looks too modern.
- Why do dyslexic-specific fonts perform poorly? The irregularity claims to be beneficial to dyslexic people but maybe is too much, affecting smoothness of reading and emotional appeal
- Why does Comic Sans perform poorly, even though it's most used font and thought to be helpful to learning readers? No data to back up this claim, but it's possible the childish appearance is more appealing to young readers. But on the other hand, it could have performed poorly because it's trendy to hate Comic Sans.
- Is there an unconscious bias toward serif designs? Reading on a computer is more commonplace, and perhaps we associate sans serif with screens and serif with print.
- Times New Roman has some characteristics of fonts that perform well, but letter spacing is tight.
- Lower-case g: modern g is not necessarily more accessible, or we'd expect Roboto to perform better
- x-height impacts perceived size, even at same font-size. Smaller x-height is perceived as "less readable"