Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

by fanf2 • 2 years ago

786 211 2 years ago

rcarmo• 2 years ago

Not bad. Can’t see if they have a fixed width version though.

jdknezek3• 2 years ago

I made a custom build[1] of Iosevka[2] that chooses glyph variants based on Atkison Hyperlegible. I like it a lot and over time prefer it to the other Iosevka stylistic sets.

[1] https://github.com/jdknezek/Iosevka/blob/jdk/scripts/hyperse...

[2] https://typeof.net/Iosevka

lambdaba2• 2 years ago

Sounds very cool, could you upload a screenshot of it in action?

indemnity• 2 years ago

Since I discovered Iosevka a few years back it has been my daily driver for 80% of the time. I use other fonts from time to time but I always go back to my custom build of Iosevka.

Yours actually looks a bit more readable than mine, gonna check it out your build plan.

Thanks!

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

It reminds me of IBM Plex, if you're just looking for similar looks.

m463• 2 years ago

Please enter your email address to begin downloading.

zamadatix• 2 years ago

What's funny is on the same page they say it's on Google Fonts and you don't need enter an email (or have an account) to grab it from there https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible

theandrewbailey• 2 years ago

And from Google Fonts, it's licensed under the Open Font License, not a unique one.

vntok• 2 years ago

This sentence is indeed written on the linked page. What exactly is it that you want to express?

t-3• 2 years ago

It's available as a package on all the linux and BSD distros I'm running.

rossy• 2 years ago

They don't tell you you can put anything with an @ and a . in that field.

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

Yea email fields without required verification get my maximum character length pseudo email.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

That's a hard nope, for me.

It's only a "nice-to-have" font.

I have an OG mac.com email, and some woman used it to sign a donation to ASPCA, a number of years ago.

They then sold it to some liberal group, who then sold it to some ultra-liberal group.

I get dozens of extreme-left emails, every day. It's crazy.

I'm not extreme anything, and want to puke, just reading the subject lines (for the record, the extreme-right is an even more effective emetic).

I would be interested (but not really that interested) in finding out who these folks would sell my email to.

Heliodex• 2 years ago

Pretty awesome font, I've found it pairs really well with other readable fonts like Lexend too.

sb057• 2 years ago

While the characters are certainly distinctive, I find paragraphs to actually be less legible than, say, Times New Roman.

alberth• 2 years ago

It improves legibility and readability

Agreed.

It seems to improve legibility. I'm not so sure it improve readability.

Readability is largely influenced by the x-height (height of lowercase letter), because your brain is trying to discern the "shape" of a word - which allows you to read faster. Hence why ALL CAPS is difficult to read because the word shape is the same.

Atkinson appears to have a high x-height, which reduces readability.

prewett• 2 years ago

I think SIL's Andika font [1] is designed with similar goals, although I think informed more by teaching reading. I didn't see any large samples, but the font seems a little subtler. Presumably, given the name, the Braille Institute's readers are more visually impaired than SIL's, so for those us with less impairment, maybe SIL's would be more readable?

OpenDyslexic [2] is another interesting font. I've heard that asymmetry helps dyslexic readers, and (given a cursory glance) they seem to have done a good job having asymmetry and style. I've also heard that SIL's font is helpful for dyslexics, but that was a while back and now they have multiple font styles, so I'm not sure if the one above is the one or not.

I didn't realize this until I worked on some software for dyslexic readers, but the normal computer font makes bdpq look pretty much identical except for rotation. It has a minimalist elegance, but for new/foreign readers, it's pretty subtle. I remember learning Chinese and had to spend quite some time with two characters, which differed only with one have a dot and one a short vertical line at top (a dot looks pretty similar to a vertical line at a cursory glance, as it is more inverted teardrop shape than a circle). After that the western alphabet looked a lot more uniform than I'd originally thought.

[1] https://software.sil.org/andika/andika-and-the-visually-impa...

[2] https://opendyslexic.org/

heymhm• 2 years ago

Andika is beautiful, thanks :)

AndyKluger4• 2 years ago

There's a font apparently based on Andika with some disambiguating improvements, called Cadman.

Cthulhu_• 2 years ago

I'm not a font or readabiliity expert, but it sounds like that is the tradeoff they had to make; paragraph legibility is not as important as being able to make out the words in the first place, and people with visual issues will struggle to read even if the font is better suited for them.

jazzyjackson3• 2 years ago

See also the font designed for readability* in Airbus cockpits

https://b612-font.com/

quesera2• 2 years ago

The header image on that site seems to show two font variants (slashed-zero and non-slashed) in a single display. This puzzles me!

aftbit2• 2 years ago

I see the slashed zero on the right, but I cannot find a way to get that out of the Google font display. Perhaps the slashed zero is actually a different font?

spidermonkey23• 2 years ago

It's a good one to add as a custom font on Kindle/ebook devices

RadiozRadioz• 2 years ago

I did find it easy to read. But the font size on this website is also larger than average (at least on my mobile phone), so that is a variable that would have to be controlled first.

jsheard• 2 years ago

It's on Google Fonts so you can use their type tester:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible/test...

amirmasoudabdol• 2 years ago

Is there a monospaced version, or an inspired monospaced version based on this available?

nh2• 2 years ago

I need that too for hyper-OCR-able monospace labels.

cromniomancer• 2 years ago

Not that I've found, but I use Commit Mono alongside it with good results

https://commitmono.com/

keyle3• 2 years ago

"Safari download not working, try Firefox or Chrome"

You gotta be joking.

keyle3• 2 years ago

yeah it's obviously a low priority for them but a monospace version of this font would be very interesting.

jdknezek3• 2 years ago

I made a custom Iosevka build by selecting glyph variants based on Atkison Hyperlegible.

Iosevka: https://typeof.net/Iosevka

"Hypersevka" build plans: https://github.com/jdknezek/Iosevka/blob/jdk/scripts/hyperse...

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/7BZS3Pp https://imgur.com/sudNqWM

AndyKluger4• 2 years ago

Iosevka is absolutely wonderful!

I have my own builds -- not based on AH's glyph choices, but also chosen to minimize glyph ambiguity.

I'll mention another great legible monospace project: 0xProto

---

Build: https://github.com/AndydeCleyre/archbuilder_iosevka/releases...

Screenshot Mono: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/k46acrxl297.png

Screenshot Mono with syntax highlighting: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/l4nec9d8lm4.png

Screenshot Proportional: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/6yxkce8p6a7.png

0xProto: https://github.com/0xType/0xProto

zamalek2• 2 years ago

I really like the aesthetics of Iosevka, but the glyphs are really narrow - resulting in severe readability problems for me (I'm diagnosed dyslexic).

letmeinhere• 2 years ago

I recently replaced mine and ruled out a bunch of others based on just two rules:

- the zero must have a mark - the base of the lower case L must go to the right and not the left, for better distinction from the number one

knowitnone• 2 years ago

Hack font is pretty good and doesn't collect your email https://github.com/source-foundry/Hack

dang• 2 years ago

Related. Others?

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799872 - Sept 2022 (234 comments)

Atkinson Hyperlegible – a font by the Braille Institute designed for legibility - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28010540 - July 2021 (1 comment)

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26011945 - Feb 2021 (86 comments)

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25154417 - Nov 2020 (10 comments)

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853550 - Oct 2020 (3 comments)

jay_kyburz• 2 years ago

You know, this feature could be a little side bar on the top right, or just as a header for every post. (I assume its semi automated, but I would be happy to see it all the time)

yesco• 2 years ago

Isn't that the point of the "past" button though? I've always assumed the purpose of Dang's "related" comments were to help bridge the discussion.

NKosmatos• 2 years ago

Before I post something on HN I always do a search to see if it has been posted recently. If it's more than 2-3 years old, I post it again in order for new users (and others who forget it) to notice it.

There have been other similar suggestions i.e. when filling the information for a new submission to have an automatic duplicate search and produce a warning, but I've come to understand that adding features to the simple/lean HN page is not desired. Same goes for native dark mode (with having to load scripts/plugins/whatever).

I can understand Feature Creep (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep) fears, but it seems that here we're doing the exact opposite :-)

rolfus• 2 years ago

Agreed. The 3rd party app I'm using to read HN on mobile (Glider) has this feature and it's both useful and unobtrusive.

Screenshot: https://www.imgpaste.net/image/SDoBg6

BerislavLopac• 2 years ago

The "Refined Hacker News" extension for Chrome [0] and Firefox [1] adds something similar (among other things) to the bottom of every thread.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/refined-hacker-news...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refined-hacke...

al_borland• 2 years ago

Clicking the URL next to the post title provides this, at least for fairly unique pages. It’s less useful when the link is from a popular news site.

Terr_• 2 years ago

I wonder if making old comments too-easily available backfire by reducing new takes and fresh discussion. Probably not in this particular case, it seems like a potential risk when designing a social news site.

P.S.: I choose to believe the neurons that instinctively throw up "but what if it's actually bad" represents a useful software design skill, rather than just a personality flaw. :p

omoikane• 2 years ago

Atkinson Hyperlegible appears to slash their zeroes in the same direction as backslash, unlike all other fonts I have used where the slash in slashed zeroes have the same direction as a forward slash. Not sure if this was a deliberate design choice.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible?prev...

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inconsolata?preview.text=0...

commodoreboxer• 2 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out. It looked weird to me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why.

zinekeller2• 2 years ago

Probably since that it's intended for legibilty, it's to differentiate 0 from Ø.

a_e_k• 2 years ago

I used a reverse-slashed zero in my programming font [1][2] for exactly that reason. I wanted it to be clearly distinct from an O with stroke (and by more than just the slash not extending past the bowl).

[1] http://eastfarthing.com/luculent/

[2] https://usemodify.com/fonts/luculent/

fsckboy3• 2 years ago

it's to differentiate 0 from Ø [a letter used in Danish, Norwegian]

most importantly it's to differentiate it from ∅, mathematical null set.

"computer people" feel this understandable need to differentiate their zeroes, but "CS-is-math people" are like "but don't use null set!" <— ᵇᵘᵗ ʸᵒᵘ ʲᵘˢᵗ ᵘˢᵉᵈ ᶠᵃᶜᵗᵒʳᶦᵃˡ

ahmedfromtunis3• 2 years ago

My guess is that the other fonts do it to differentiate the slash zero and the Norwegian letter Ø.

If that's true then AH's choice seems counterintuitive to me.

notatoad• 2 years ago

to be clear, atkinson hyperlegible slashes the zero in the opposite direction to the Ø.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible?prev...

d1sxeyes• 2 years ago

Theoretically, a slashed zero should not have the slash extending beyond the main body of the character, but in practice, especially in sloppy writing (when the slashed zero is more common) it often does. Also when designing a font for someone who has difficulties distinguishing character shapes, small differences like that may not be immediately obvious. Using a reverse slash immediately shows that it’s a zero without any clashes.

I think it’s a fairly elegant solution at the slight cost of being a little unfamiliar (although the slashed zero itself is quite unfamiliar to most people).

DiscourseFan• 2 years ago

I understand if this is supposed to be better for dyslexics, but the fact that the distinctions of the letters are so heavily emphasized makes it harder to read, since I generally read entire words at a time, not letters, and the individual letters are less important than how they look together in a word or a sentence.

SSLy2• 2 years ago

consider https://www.oliviaking.com/inclusive-sans

bmicraft3• 2 years ago

I really dislike them having lower L just be a straight bar - And I'm saying that as someone that hates serif fonts with a passion.

It doesn't really help you while reading that capital letter i looks different. You have to (1) know which font you're currently reading and (2) know that a straight bar isn't a capital i.

This is kind aggregated by the fact that I'd naturally assume if only one letter looked like that it would be capital letter i. An assumption that is backed by this very website: I, l

marginalia_nu3• 2 years ago

Personally I find Comic Sans easiest to read, as dyslexic. I even use a monospace version of the font for coding and in the terminal.

russfink• 2 years ago

Would that by chance be the Pointfree font?

fnordpiglet2• 2 years ago

That’s fascinating do you have any insights as to why?

ggm• 2 years ago

I am not dyslexic and I use this font too, because it's easier on my eyes. I find myself increasingly thinking "Courier" when I look at it and have to remind myself its not, and I chose it.

ppseafield• 2 years ago

Likewise I've used Fantasque Sans Mono (related to Comic Sans) for a long time as a coding font.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 2 years ago

Have you tried any Dyslexic fonts, like https://opendyslexic.org/ ?

ahmedfromtunis3• 2 years ago

I'm not sure this font takes into consideration dyslexia as it seems, from what I read, focused on people with very bad eyesight.

extra88• 2 years ago

Yes, but it does include some features that seem to be included with dyslexia in mind. Letters like d and b have small differences so they're not mirror images of each other.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

I like this idea, but for most companies, they've already decided on their fonts and many corporations already have strict guidelines on what fonts to use and many are either variants of popular fonts, or changed in some way that aligns with their branding.

I still think its a good step forward.

hinkley7• 2 years ago

My go-to is Verdana based on previous empirical tests. It's bigger at the same pt size compared to other fonts, but if you size it down about 1/12th it is just as legible but at a higher characters per inch, which is good for trying to squeeze text into an interface, especially when that interface may be viewed by a group on a projector or screen share.

I just tried to half-ass a similar test by editing the Google Font explorer UI to put them next to each other. Atkinson beats out Verdana for width, by about 4% (eyeballed and envelope math), however it's also 1 pixel taller per line at that size. So it's a more rectangular font. I'd have to think about how I'd want to use it, if I care more about lines per page or characters per column.

ComputerGuru2• 2 years ago

If you’re a Verdana fan, you might appreciate this write up I did on it some years back: https://neosmart.net/blog/tahoma-vs-verdana/

It backs what you say!

hinkley7• 2 years ago

I don’t recall why Tahoma didn’t win. The letters may have been too close together for comfortable reading, resulting in the need for a larger point for the same comprehension. I mentioned above in another reply that we had one dissenter in the taste test, I think now that they may have voted for Tahoma.

wild_egg• 2 years ago

My go-to is Verdana based on previous empirical tests.

Do you have any handy links around this? I've a passing interest in information-dense UIs and font choice is a vital but often overlooked aspect of such interfaces. Would love to see how others evaluate such things.

hinkley7• 2 years ago

The empirical test was the entire team standing at the back of a conference room in shitty lighting basically taking a vision test. One person I believe voted for a different font, everyone else thought Verdana showed up best.

ghssds• 2 years ago

Is there any peer-reviewed studies about this or are those claims unsubstantiated?

barbegal• 2 years ago

No studies at all, all the claims are anecdotal at best.

cormullion• 2 years ago

There is some research which suggests that the human brain “learns” to read an unfamiliar font reasonably fluently after about 30 minutes of use, and that recognition continues to improve with continued use. The well-known saying “we read best what we read most” suggests that a font itself contributes only partly towards readability - your personal habits and experience are also significant.

aftbit2• 2 years ago

I found it amusing that the end user license agreement is available only as a PDF on Box. That's not exactly the most accessible format but I got it downloaded. It appears to be a relatively straightforward license, prohibiting commercial resale of the font and its derivatives, but allowing it to be bundled with commercially sold software.

https://braileinstitute.app.box.com/s/rin3vzegmcy7sil28yfqsl...

hlieberman• 2 years ago

It's actually just the SIL font license, which is what basically every open source font uses. They just removed the preamble of it for some reason.

Javalicious• 2 years ago

Yeah, I wish they would just keep the boilerplate OFL intact. I spent way too much time trying to figure out what the "real" license was, and if I could use it in my open source projects.

Nemo_bis• 2 years ago

Infuriatingly, they didn't actually use the same text but they introduced multiple tiny changes so that you're forced to check word-by-word whether it's still an open/free license.

Was it really necessary to replace "Original or Modified Versions" with "The Original Version or Modified Version", or "Reserved Font Name(s)" with "Reserved Typeface Name"? So necessary that you're willing to sacrifice potential reuse?

JamesCoyne• 2 years ago

Google thinks it's OFL v1.1 https://github.com/googlefonts/atkinson-hyperlegible?tab=rea... But it also has a Reserved Font Name, so probably OFL-1.1-RFN going by the SPDX License List https://spdx.org/licenses/

Kinda too bad they don't just state which license they're aiming for.

inktype• 2 years ago

I found it amusing that the license PDF does not use the font. (At least, the slashed 0 in the license pdf is not the backslashed 0 on the font web page.)

dqv2• 2 years ago

What screen reader did you use? NVDA didn't really choke on it. The dialog for downloading is weird though - it just announces a dialog and then sign up/login links (which are double labeled). The weird spacing that a lot of PDFs have makes the speech synthesizer slightly mispronounce words right before line breaks though. I would say the PDF itself is more accessible than the process provided to download it.

nemetroid• 2 years ago

That’s one ugly Å, without any separation. The font looks nice in general though.

Findecanor• 2 years ago

In my opinion as a native Swedish person (where that letter is part of our language), not separating the ring from the A is justified only when the font size is very small.

zahlman• 2 years ago

Weirdly, I got eye strain from that page. I think it's not the font itself to blame, but the combination of its default size in my browser with being #000000 on #FFFFFF - too much contrast.

elric• 2 years ago

Same here. That page is not very easy on the eyes, and that's with my brightness and contrast tuned for comfort.

NelsonMinar• 2 years ago

I appreciate that an expert institution designed a font for low vision readers with actual research. Every time I run an app that has OpenDyslexic as a font choice I die a little inside. It's the worst sort of "pretend to be helping" option. It actually is worse for reading than ordinary fonts. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5629233/

zharknado• 2 years ago

“OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading.”

Yikes, not a strong design IMO. I know very little about dyslexia, but reading individual words as a small child doesn’t seem like a comprehensive way to measure “how dyslexic people read.”

Presumably the primary envisioned use-case for a specialized typeface like this is paragraphs of text, read by people who have the language skills to ”think in paragraphs,” even if the visual processing is a challenge.

This is all armchair, I’d welcome correction or nuance.

yababa_y• 2 years ago

I guess I’m the rare duckling who would report preferring OpenDyslexic! IMO it scans better, and is excellent when combined with beeline reader.

When I was at the ages of the sample, my lexile scores were through the roof, compared to the sample here which has poor to middling reading ability (typical for dyslexia) — i do not have dyslexia but still feels like OpenDyslexic makes it easier to read.

The data in the study does not support your conclusion that it “actually is worse”, unless i missed something in my interpretation? It seems to be a wash.

This smaller N=3 study supports the efficacy of OpenDyslexic, using _actual reading tasks_ instead of the more artificial task in the study you provided: https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/tayjournal/issue/76493/11524...

andai• 2 years ago

One of the testimonials implies that they've forced all websites to use this font, and it improved their experience significantly.

I suspect that would be true of Arial, even! This has been my goal for some time, but no browser has such an option. (You can change the default font, but almost no website leaves it set to default, so it does nothing.)

claytonwramsey• 2 years ago

In Firefox, you can the advanced font settings and uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above” to force websites to use the default font.

_heimdall5• 2 years ago

Does this break icon fonts, or will icon fonts still display since the font you choose wouldn't have those ligatures defined?

bobbylarrybobby• 2 years ago

I know that safari lets (or at least used to let) you apply a custom CSS file on top of pages’ own styles.

gcr• 2 years ago

Chrome has that in the preferences. Don’t even need a feature flag or user styles.

jp57• 2 years ago

I would like to see HN use this.

thedrake• 2 years ago

Great seeing that they also have a great website score for Web Accessibility https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://www.brailleinstitute... which shows a near perfect Web Accessibility Score.

Gives credence that they do take it seriously.

dqv2• 2 years ago

Yeah, these tests are great for finding obvious mistakes, but it can't help with improving UX past a certain point. I get the sense that a lot of vision-impaired folks are so busy fighting for bare minimum accessibility that they don't get the opportunity to ask for better UX. As an example in NVDA, go to heading level 2 "Unique Design Features", advance past the two sentences, right after "...make each one unique", you will hear "beeightohoh", text, then "oneaiaiell", text, then "eeeffpeecue", and so on. It's like Mojibake [0] for screen readers. Or maybe not - I don't know because I am sighted!

I was thinking about how I'd fix it if it were an issue. A person who doesn't have enough visual acuity to see the distinctness of the glyphs might still want to understand the specific examples of normally-ambiguous glyphs. I came up with this, but it still isn't the best and probably breaks expectations:

        <style type="text/css">
            .sr-only {
            border: 0 !important;
            clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px) !important;
            -webkit-clip-path: inset(50%) !important;
            clip-path: inset(50%) !important;
            height: 1px !important;
            overflow: hidden !important;
            margin: -1px !important;
            padding: 0 !important;
            position: absolute !important;
            width: 1px !important;
            white-space: nowrap !important;
            }
        </style>
        <figure>
            <div>
                <span class="sr-only">(distinct glyphs)</span>B8<span class="sr-only">(out of distinct glyphs)</span>
                <span aria-hidden="true"> </span>
                <span class="sr-only">(distinct glyphs)</span>O0<span class="sr-only">(out of distinct glyphs)</span>
            </div>
            <figcaption>
                <strong>Unambiguous Letterforms<span class="sr-only">:</span></strong><br> Letters have received special care to ensure they’re legible and clear.
            </figcaption>
        </figure>

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

dundercoder• 2 years ago

Visually impaired guy here, always excited to see things that make my life easier. Also great that it shows blindness is a spectrum, not a binary condition.

fsckboy3• 2 years ago

open letter to all font people: You have a skill, design, which is a skill I don't have, so I am glad you are working on fonts and not me. A beautiful font is a thing to behold, it decreases stress and leaves us muy tranquilo-OOOOMMMM

however: when I am in a spreadsheet, trying to choose a typeface & font for one column, my goal is NEVER to suddenly expand either the width, or the height, or the amount of hover over the baseline, or fabulous quantities of descender or ascender, or linespacing or i-don't-know,-you-tell-me-the-terminology, I don't want your typeface to shockingly change its alignment to all the other text I have

and that includes "oh, just select a different pointsize"; if things are the same pointsize, then they should be able to sit next to one another; I know it's not your fault, but you know whose fault it really really isn't? MINE

I really want to use your typefaces; don't make it so hard

atoav4• 2 years ago

I agree that fonts should not differ too much in size and other important metrics, but if you select a condensed font for example expectations are that you can fit more letters into the same line.

Now of every font would do equal spacing (something that your spreadsheet software could just implement, btw.) what would the point be of having different fonts?

As you are running the system ypu could also just make a selection of particularily equal fonts and remove the rest, if that annoys you.

xutopia• 2 years ago

I have a feeling I'm looking at Comic Sans... and the idea that Comic Sans might actually be a really legible font dawns on me. I don't know what to believe anymore.

andatki• 2 years ago

What a name! - A dot Atkinson

PhasmaFelis• 2 years ago

The "clear uprights" feature is something I've been shouting about for a long time. It's inexcusable that commonly-used fonts like Verdana (right here on HN) can't distinguish between l and I.

mastazi• 2 years ago

I have an issue with the lowercase q which looks a lot like a lowercase a. In many other fonts, these two letters look quite different and it's unlikely that you would mix them up.

mzs• 2 years ago

qu vs a

thomas-st• 2 years ago

It looks a bit like a handwritten Polish ą

rasguanabana• 2 years ago

For sure string like "zqb" would give me a pause with this letterform, because it looks a lot like "ząb". Maybe it would be clearer in surrounding text, though.

endverbraucher• 2 years ago

Also consider "Atkinson Hyperlegible Pro" an updated and slightly extendend Version: https://github.com/tryoxiss/atkinson-hyperlegible-pro

dartharva2• 2 years ago

I am astigmatic. I tried taking off my glasses and reading this page side-by-side against a Substack article zoomed in at the same font size at a distance. I could not make any difference in ease of reading or legibility, I struggled roughly equally for both of them. What am I missing?

atoav4• 2 years ago

Nothing. Most typefaces are already pretty good at being legible, so we are talking about marginal gains here. A font like that where usually similar-looking characters are easily distinguished shines more when applied e.g. in forms or other applications where precise input is required.

hypercube33• 2 years ago

Thats interesting because I arrived at the same conclusion.

At first glance for me it really seemed like its a font strait out of a elementary grade level textbook. Maybe its the website layout, maybe its that the font is huge and spaced the same, I'm not sure.

As far as easier to read, I am on the fence versus monospaced computer fonts if its any better or not. I wonder what their research behind this is but the website started to bug me so I didnt dig deeper personally

Popeyes• 2 years ago

I find this with a lot of assistive fonts, that they have claims but no research that says "Yes, this makes a dramatic difference". For example, the OpenDyslexic font I've never seen any research that it make any more difference yet I see people act like it's an answer. Big text is easier to read.

MavisBacon• 2 years ago

I attended a talk given on this font at an assistive technology conference recently. This seems to actually have a body of evidence demonstrating its benefits in specific use cases. Also from a design standpoint it truly is superior to alternatives. Things like dyslexia fonts are largely considered entirely ineffective in the field

pjerem• 2 years ago

I can’t see without my glasses so I didn’t try. But I have a huge myopia, not perfectly corrected astigmatism (like, it’s fine but glasses can’t correct it perfectly) and on top of that, I have amblyopia (which you can approximate by : my brain learned to use only one eye).

And I do find Atkinson hyperlegible more … legible. Not life changing since my vision is still ok and I’m still young.

And I find it interesting because with my mix of conditions, my issues aren’t seeing clearly (I see clearly with my glasses) but eye strain. I can have a day where I see clearly in the morning and blurry at night. Anything that reduces this strain changes my life. And, maybe it’s placebo, but I feel like this font helps.

chronogram2• 2 years ago

I don't know if it's actually easier to read in a sentence compared to the standard of Frutiger and Frutiger-likes. That's what you'll likely see on your medicine packaging and train- and road signs. It does try to be unambiguous by differentiating glyphs, which can be helpful with some standalone words.

nabla9• 2 years ago

Subtle differences are not that easy to compare. You would have to test reading and comprehension speed and also while skimming and searching information.

If some font, color, or UI feature provides 1-5% improvement, it's huge because it accumulates over long term, but it's hard to notice immediately.

hinkley7• 2 years ago

What fonts do you like?

dartharva2• 2 years ago

In general? Roboto comes to mind. Hack for monospace.

throwaway81523• 2 years ago

This is a sans serif font. I thought that impairs readability in blocks of text.

mungoman2• 2 years ago

Nice, but kerning seems off. See for example word "Tails" in the article. a and i should be closer.

notorandit• 2 years ago

The font itself is not enough for good readability.

So-called "UI/UX" designer are making a lot of fancy work to make things illegible. Contrast between background (aka "paper") and foreground (aka "ink") is going down and down. So, no matter the font of choice, text is becoming less readable (and less relevant) also because of color choices. While video and audio contents is getting more and more attention.

Maxion• 2 years ago

Contrast is not the end-all-be-all I have pretty severe astigmatism, and when contrast is too high I get quite severe visual artifacts. For me text is more legible if the contrast is a bit tamed.

leptons• 2 years ago

There's plenty of middle ground between too-artsy low contrast light color fonts on light color background and high-contrast text.

akvadrako2• 2 years ago

Too much contrast is hard to read, though it also depends on the quality of your monitor and the ambient lighting. OLEDs have infinite contrast ratios with black text or backgrounds, which is too much.

For example when I first saw this new CV I thought, "that's really easy on the eyes".

https://worrydream.com/

bcoates• 2 years ago

Generally OLEDs don't use off for black outside of special-effect low power modes. The display only has stable contrast above some threshold brightness that in a dark viewing environment is going to be noticeably brighter than off, and it looks awful below that. The #000 point is set well brighter than that level.

hinkley7• 2 years ago

There’s a trick I picked up on one project and made lots of use of in the one I mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Everyone at that time was using charcoal black (#333) text on light grey backgrounds (#e0e0e0 or #ddd) or even middle grey backgrounds (#ccc), or white text on dark grey or highly saturated backgrounds and it was a mess.

You add a 1 pixel radius, zero offset 70% opacity white shadow to dark text, or the same shadow in black to inverse (light) text, and the letters pop without the shadow being noticeable except under zoom. The page takes a little bit longer to render, but at least you can read it despite the designer’s attempt to sabotage basic UX principles.

The translucency makes it work on other colors as well, if you have color coded labels for instance, like a dark blue bar with grey text.

me_jumper3• 2 years ago

I'm personally not sure if I like the font in bodies of text, but I adore it for presentations.

You don't have long texts on slides, and everything is very distinct. I find it especially helpful, as many setups where one presents can be suboptimal (e.g., bad lighting, obstructed views, warped surface that is projected on, …). Which is where this font shines not only for people with impaired vision, but for everyone.

hinkley7• 2 years ago

I haven’t needed to optimize displays for projectors for some time, but when I did I was shocked how long 1024x768 survived. If you were lucky you’d get a 1280 pixel projector. And almost invariably, any shade of grey lighter than E7E7E7 was indistinguishable from white. People like to put light gray lines in tabular data to help the eye track across. It disappears and then people keep interrupting the meeting flow to ask questions about the data they were meant to be able to answer with their eyeballs. Though once in a while they’d put light grey in a bar chart and then they were fucked.

They are also all ever so slightly out of focus. Or dust on the lens. Or projecting on an orange peel wall instead of a screen.

I’m curious how things have improved in let’s say the last ten years. Still hot garbage?

me_jumper3• 2 years ago

Depends on where you are, I guess. I work at a University in Germany, and most meeting rooms are either 1) very old and exactly as you've described, or 2) updated in the last few years and actually usable. There doesn't seem to be an in-between.

regularfry• 2 years ago

You don't have long texts on slides, and everything is very distinct.

Writing as I do from inside an organisation where the standard seems to be to communicate through meetings where someone reads out the text on a powerpoint slide, I can say that this is nothing if not optimistic.

me_jumper3• 2 years ago

fair, maybe I'm too optimistic or too privileged in that regard.

Doesn't change my other points through ;)

queuebert2• 2 years ago

I'll be glad if the people I work with just stop using Comic Sans.

BaudouinVH• 2 years ago

That font is not the only designed for legibility. Luciole is another one :

https://luciole-vision.com/luciole-en.html

mikae1• 2 years ago

https://www.lexend.com is an alternative.

Dansvidania• 2 years ago

i just want to say the terms and condition were 2 pages of pretty simple language and this was probably the first time I encounter term in such a consumable form. cheers.

Diti• 2 years ago

The most legible font I have ever seen – and I wish someone would make an open-source version of it, and a monospace version, along with more glyphs – is Heinemann Special. No two characters look the same, and the font is really pleasant to read. No [back]slashed-zero, though.

chronogram2• 2 years ago

A monospace version of a font designed to have every glyph be different is DP Sans Mono: https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Sans_Mono

tokai2• 2 years ago

Reading through their license it is very much open source. It gives the rights to "to use, study, copy, merge, embed, modify, redistribute, and sell modified and unmodified copies" and thus covers the requirements of open source.

cprecioso• 2 years ago

covers the requirements of open source

There's no source

snthpy• 2 years ago

Is there a Nerdfont version of this that I can use for my terminal?

globular-toast• 2 years ago

Sure, it's readable, but the font size is also set to be twice as big as what I set my font size as (2rem) so I would expect that. Assuming everyone sets their font to what is acceptable for them, what is the reason for setting this page to 2x that size?

msla• 2 years ago

I just like that it's normally legible, in that it distinguishes AI from Al and such, which normal sans-serif fonts rarely do. It does this by having serifs, yes, which seems like a lost art among the Usability Experts of the world.

AlanYx2• 2 years ago

Is the tight kerning before the lowercase letter "l" intentional? I find it hard to believe that's the optimum choice for readability. Words like "title" seem like they're harder to read than average because there's almost no space between the t and the l.

bayindirh• 2 years ago

If you look at other letters, the i's kerning is relieved by other letters' tails or kerning. The opening text contains the word institute and it's neither cramped nor hard to read w.r.t. other text.

AlanYx2• 2 years ago

I don't have an issue with the "i", it's the "l" that is tight.

zelphirkalt2• 2 years ago

I find it easier to distinguish "O" and "0" in fonts that distinguish between capital letter "O" and number zero "0" by putting a dot or something inside. It is already annoying, when you need to guess based on width or other shape between the 2, because that assumes, that you are seeing both at the same time, looking back and forth between them.

Additionally "I" and "l" look way too similar.

So I think "Unambiguous Letterforms" in this case not necessarily true.

dylanowen• 2 years ago

Maybe the font didn't load correctly but it solves both those problems from what I can see.

zelphirkalt2• 2 years ago

Ah that would be an explanation. I simply assumed they would be using pictures and did not check, whether I can highlight single letters. It's a pity then, since I am not loading fonts from a random third party, especially not from a bad actor like Google. The site also never asked me for consent, so it should not be including Google stuff anyway.

Night_Thastus• 2 years ago

This is the sort of thing I'd love to see Tentacruel look at. His videoes briefly covered iconography and fonts and I'd bet he'd have some cool insights about this font.

RicoElectrico• 2 years ago

That q is too similar to single story ą for my taste (even if this font uses double story a/ą). But otherwise it's the most aesthetically pleasing of the legibility-oriented fonts :)

klondike_klive• 2 years ago

Ironically I find "legibility" to be a real train wreck of a word to read. Not just in this font (although I do find the shorter ascenders difficult) but as a word, generally.

Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

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