Is this font alright?

Started by Darius Poyer, Mon 26/12/2011 13:57:47

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Snarky

Quote from: Darius Poyer on Fri 30/12/2011 14:19:21
Of course you may not find that the letters are all that important, but you can read this perfectly fine:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Off topic, but this demonstration doesn't prove the statement it contains. The letters within each word have not been randomized, they've mostly just been swapped one or two positions. Crucially, all the vowels are still in order, with only a few exceptions. If the letters (except the first and last) had been completely randomized, the result would be more or less unreadable, except for when you have sequences of very short words, like in the second sentence.

Cambridge University via Snopes.com.

Tabata

Quote from: Darius Poyer on Tue 27/12/2011 12:31:53
The other reason is that I read about a font called 'dyslexie'. It was designed for dyslectics to be as readable as possible. The major reason it works is because it strives to give letters as unique a shape as possible. ...

I want to recommend the interesting little video, since it gives good reasons for how the fonts are done.

Without this information I wanted to customize the fonts, too.
I think, that's the usual way most of us would try, but meant to be a special (and small) font that can be recognized by every reader (dyslectic or not), I prefer the version from reply No 13 with the letters to realize, even when rotated.

Well, I am not an expert and there might be something wrong "by the rules",
but in my personal opinion this special font is very well done. 
                                             

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

QuoteDid you miss this?

Actually I did.  I read the initial post about wanting to make it readable for dyslectics but missed the follow up post where he explained a desire to make each letter unique.


QuoteWhen it comes to low-rez fonts I find that the notion of consistency becomes very abstract
and this
QuoteBut you can't establish any strict rules when it comes to a font this small. It has to be flexible in favor of readability.

I disagree.  You certainly can establish a set of rules that under all normal conditions maintain readability for people, but is your font only for dyslectics or for everyone?  I found your initial attempt really rough and hard to read and offered some advice based on that.  Your edited version is more readable, though I would say it has hiccups along areas where some of the letters are too thin while others are too thick, creating odd gaps between them here and there.

QuoteI'm not sure what you mean by this:

For maximum readability with small fonts, some font makers (myself included on occasion) will opt to make the lowercase letters scaled down versions of their uppercase counterparts rather than making them true lowercase.  This has the advantage of making the letters all appear slightly bigger and more obvious.  I suppose if uniformity damages readability for dyslectics then the uniqueness of lowercase letters should actually improve readability even at small sizes, right?  In that case you could just use the lowercase style for capital and non-capital letters, just at different scales.

Since you mention uniformity as an issue, is lowercase difficult to read for dyslectics generally or only with specific fonts?  Is it more or less difficult to read than uppercase?



Radiant

You're seriously using MediaFire for a file less than a kilobyte in size? :P

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