Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

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)

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

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).

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.

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

> 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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What fonts do you like?

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.

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

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

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.

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.)

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.

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

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

https://commitmono.com/

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

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

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

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!

> 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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/

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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...

> “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.

It looks a bit like a handwritten Polish ą

qu vs a

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.

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/

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.

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.

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>

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It's BrailleInstitute, an org catering to those with visual impairments. Understandably, their site is accommodating to their core audience.

So, um, this website expects a nontrivial amount of their traffic to be sight impaired. It probably isn't designed this way for your benefit if this is your complaint.