Daphne Preston-Kendal
(This is how you get ‘treatments’ for autistic children which amount to subjecting them to psychological torture all day long for most of their childhood. Don’t look into this kind of thing unless you want to be made very angry and very sad.)
Anyway, it seems the Braille Institute is one of the trustworthy sources on disability info, actually run by blind and vision impaired people
Daphne Preston-Kendal
As a side note, one thing I did want to check up on was whether the Braille Institute was actually a trustworthy source for materials to help vision impaired people.
The US has a culture of treating people with any kind of disability, mental or physical, as subhuman; part of this is able-bodied and able-minded people setting up ‘institutes’ with trustworthy-sounding names to ‘help’ disabled people become ‘normal’ with deeply degrading treatments
Daphne Preston-Kendal
To be clear, I’m not being flippant about vision impairment:
Being better for short-sighted people to read would obviously be a benefit, but it’s not the main goal here.
Distance focussing issues are by far the most common vision problems, but not the only ones. Nonetheless, demonstrations of Atkinson’s superiority seem to focus on distance focussing issues – e.g. by showing how it’s still legible after a strong Gaussian blur is applied
Daphne Preston-Kendal
A font with only a slightly less strong case for it is Atkinson Hyperlegible.
It’s not designed for dyslexic people, but for vision impaired people – needs which don’t necessarily overlap. I’m not *that* concerned about short-sighted people (I am one myself, albeit only -1.25 dioptres and not in combination with long-sightedness – yet, sigh) because if you know that you have trouble reading slides from a distance at a conference, you should be wearing your glasses.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
There are some design choices I find questionable – the single-storey ‘a’ looks maybe too childish for a professional presentation; for a typeface designed for beginning readers, I’m surprised lower case ‘L’ doesn’t curve at the bottom, nor does the tail of ‘q’ bend back to the right. But there are OpenType features for those if I wanted to change them
Daphne Preston-Kendal
Andika is designed for people learning to read, and one of the testimonials on its web page mentions it being useful for people with dyslexia. Again, it’s anecdata – but Andika is both specifically designed for this purpose (unlike Comic Sans) *much* more widely used in literacy programmes worldwide than OpenDyslexia or Dyslexie. If I were to change, Andika has the strongest case for being what I’d change to.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
So I also thought of Andika, designed for legibility. I’ve actually used it in slide shows at uni in the past, because I used Gentium for some linguistic examples (polytonic Greek, Lithuanian with stress and accent marks) and wanted a typeface for the non-example text that would mix reasonably well with it: https://software.sil.org/andika/
Daphne Preston-Kendal
So, seriously, what about Comic Sans? Well, apart from any other considerations, if I’m going to make a change to make it easier to read, I would prefer to choose a typeface that has been specifically designed and tested for purpose. If Comic Sans is better for people with dyslexia, it’s probably coincidence, and again – no evidence.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
(Again, there’s just no evidence here.)
Daphne Preston-Kendal
If these fonts *do* work for people with dyslexia, it’s a reasonable guess that it might be because their severely distorted letterforms, compared to regular typefaces, disrupts normal word-level shape recognition and forces a similar engagement with letter-by-letter word recognition that seeing words in all caps does.
The problem is that if that hypothesis is correct, it also probably means that the dyslexia typefaces will get less effective for a dyslexic person the more they read with it.
Daphne Preston-Kendal
People – dyslexic or not – recognize words by their entire shape, not letter-by-letter. (This is why if you want a word to be recognized from far away – like on a road sign – you should put it in mixed/lower case, not upper case, even though upper case intuitively seems like it would be better because it’s ‘bigger’. People are more used to seeing words in mixed or lower case, so they will more quickly recognize them.)
Daphne Preston-Kendal
So. The fonts people usually mention for this are OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie.
https://dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/
The problems:
• There is no scientific evidence that these fonts help people with dyslexia read better
• The anecdata is split, with some dyslexic people saying they make it easier for them, but some saying they make it harder
• These fonts are *ugly* and do not feel appropriate on slides
• Because they’re ugly, they’re probably harder for non-dyslexic people to read
Daphne Preston-Kendal
Spoiler alert: This is a thread about accessibility and it ends with me deciding not to do anything because of lack of evidence that doing anything would actually help more people than it hinders.
Mastodon, do not make me regret posting this thread, thank’s
Daphne Preston-Kendal
On a more serious point about fonts on slides, having looked at the reasons people claim for using Comic Sans, I’m actually considering switching to some font that would be better for any dyslexic audience members. This turned into a bit of a rabbit hole.
(At the moment I just use Helvetica because 1. it’s the default in Keynote and 2. it’s a very good match in x-height and a near-enough match in cap height to Iosevka, so there’s an easy option for a matching monospaced font for code examples)
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