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.
The issue is with OCR. Imagine something that was printed(for being physically signed or filed into a cabinet, for example) and rescanned into an image or PDF.
Both printing and scanning is lossy with lots of noise and artifacts.
The article is saying that serif fonts are harder to OCR.
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.
There are PDF's to embed OCR info on it.
The issue is with OCR. Imagine something that was printed(for being physically signed or filed into a cabinet, for example) and rescanned into an image or PDF. Both printing and scanning is lossy with lots of noise and artifacts. The article is saying that serif fonts are harder to OCR.
For example, something like this https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/6945...
I wouldn't expect it would make a difference either, but the memo made this claim