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Comment by splatzone

3 years ago

Interesting that the memo claims that sans serif fonts are preferred to serif fonts for screen reader users and people with disabilities. I thought the exact opposite was true. Is there any definitive research on which type of font is more accessible?

21 comments

splatzone

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tokai  3 years ago

"Results showed a small, but significant advantage in response times for words written in a sans serif font."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20445911.2011.5...

"Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2513383.2513447

and here a whole book about that question

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/53344

adrian_b  3 years ago

Sans serif fonts are preferable only on low-resolution displays (this includes 1080p) or at small point sizes, because in this cases the good serif fonts cannot be rendered correctly.

The classic serif fonts cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI not only due to their serifs (which must be enlarged at low resolutions, to avoid their disappearance; this transforms all classic serif typefaces into uglier slab-serif typefaces), but also due to their "contrast", i.e. because they have both thin and thick lines (which are equalized in width at low resolutions, distorting the glyphs). Some of the better modern sans serif typefaces, e.g. Optima, also cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI, due to their variable-width lines.

On high DPI displays, the preference for sans serif or for serif is driven mainly by the familiarity with the tested typefaces, so it is impossible to predict from the results of a half hour test, where the people may see for the first time some typefaces, which of them they would prefer after using them continuously for six months.

Y_Y  3 years ago

Am I being thick, or does a screen reader not care what the font is?

  • zrobotics  3 years ago

    One of our employees is blind, and screen readers (JAWS is what he uses) can be fairly finicky. For a case where you are looking at or editing the document in MS Word it doesn't matter, since if the text is readily accessible it will ignore the font. However, in something like a pdf or image it needs to OCR the text, and certain fonts are easier to read.

    I happen to know this because we ended up needing to rework our training documentation, which we supply as pdfs that were exported from Word. The screen reader needs to figure out the order of the text in the pdf, and by default word can end up exporting the text laid out in a way that causes the screen reader to parse the text out of order. There are accessibility options that can resolve this, but we ended up changing the font since that resolved the problem without needing to ensure the correct options were set everytime someone needs to update the training manuals.