Comment by praptak
5 days ago
Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities. While this itself is debatable, that's not the reasoning behind the font switch. The mere attempt at making life easier for disadvantaged people is labeled DEI and as such cannot be tolerated by this administration.
> Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities
I'd love to know how that was determined. Given that:
"If different fonts are best for different people, you might imagine that the solution to the fonts problem would be a preference setting to allow each user to select the font that’s best for them.
This solution will not work, for two reasons. First, previous research on user-interface customization has found that most users don’t use preference settings, but simply make do with the default.
Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin...
> Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
What you actually want to compare speed in the most preferred font to, to show that individual choice is or is not better than one-size-fits-all dictate, is speed in the font that would be chosen as the universal choice by whichever mechanism would be used (to show it is universally better, show that there is no universal font choice that would lead to the average user being faster than with their preferred font.)
All comparing each individual's preferred font to each individual's fastest is showing that an individualized test-based optimized font choice is better for reading speed than individual preference font choice, which I guess is interesting if you are committed to individualized choices, but not if the entire question is whether individual or centralized choices are superior.
> What you actually want to compare [..]
The (ex-)scientist in me is looking for a controlled study, ideally published in a peer reviewed journal, looking at - how can I put this - actual data.
60s of Googling gave me this
The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5629233/
"A single-subject alternating treatment design was used to investigate the extent to which a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, impacted reading rate or accuracy compared to two commonly used fonts when used with elementary students identified as having dyslexia. OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading. Data were analyzed through visual analysis and improvement rate difference, a nonparametric measure of nonoverlap for comparing treatments. Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that the font was “new” or “different”, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font."
Advocacy for people with disabilities is important, but actual data may be even more important.
A meaningful testing of the differences between fonts is greatly complicated by the effect of the familiarity with the tested fonts.
The differences between individuals which perform better with different fonts may have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the fonts but may be determined only by the previous experience of the tested subjects with the tested fonts or with other fonts that are very similar to the tested fonts.
Only if you measure reading speed differences between fonts with which the tested subjects are very familiar, e.g. by having read or written a variety of texts for one year or more, you can conclude that the speed differences may be caused by features of the font, and if the optimal fonts are different between users, then this is a real effect.
There are many fonts that have some characters which are not distinctive enough, so they have only subtle differences. When you read texts with such fonts you may confuse such characters frequently and deduce which is the correct character only from the context, causing you to linger over a word, but after reading many texts you may perceive automatically the inconspicuous differences between characters and read them correctly without confusions, at a higher speed.
Many older people, who have read great amounts of printed books, find the serif typefaces more legible, because these have been traditionally preferred in book texts. On the other hand, many younger people, whose reading experience has been provided mainly by computer/phone screens, where sans-serif fonts are preferred because of the low resolution of the screens, find sans-serif fonts more legible. This is clearly caused only by the familiarity with the tested fonts and does not provide information about the intrinsic qualities of the fonts.
Moreover, the resolution of most displays, even that of most 4k monitors, remains much lower than the resolution of printed paper and there are many classic typefaces that are poorly rendered on most computer monitors. To compare the legibility of the typefaces, one should use only very good monitors, so that some typefaces should not be handicapped. Otherwise, one should label the study as a study of the legibility as constrained by a certain display resolution. At low enough display resolutions, the fonts designed especially to avoid confusions between characters, like many of the fonts intended for programming, should outperform any others, while at high display resolutions the results may be very different.
3 replies →
In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
That may be a case of "I hate reading this font so much I don't want to do more than skim over the text."
[dead]
I would have thought the change to Calibri was simply because office uses it as the default font now
It was the default, now it's Aptos.
I don't think that much thought went into it. The change was initiated by the department's DEIA ("A" for Accessibility) office. Anything that office did was a priority for this administration.
Keep in mind that the transgenic mouse breeding program used to make lab mice for research got defined because the President claimed Democrats were so woke they were funding "trans" mice research.
Half of what they are doing is virtue signalling and posturing without any real understanding of what they are doing.
The funny thing is that they were indeed funding “trans” mice research:
> To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of “cis” vs. “trans” mice to a HIV vaccine.
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830#descriptio...
[flagged]
More than half. Almost everything they do is virtue signaling.
I listened to the economist podcast on that- hilarious in the worst way- was leading harvard research
All true except the fact that it's not virtue that they're signaling.
Cruelty signalling?
19 replies →
Virtue signaling is for liberals. Conservatives prefer shitty human signaling. Eventually folks will take them for their word I hope.
by that logic if we help them see why don't we help them understand as well?
Nope- times new roman just looks better.
More charitably, the signaling could be: “keep the government as small as possible, but no smaller than that”, i.e. use things that basically mostly work and quit expending resources addressing every edge case, particularly when it’s performative (slight font variations) rather than obvious (a ramp to get into a public building)
That's very charitable--especially considering that leaving the font alone in the first place would have been the smaller option.
And don't get me started about the current meddling of the executive in my private life? I haven't had a more intrusive administration since living in Singapore.
Microsoft Office (and Windows) changed the default font more than a decade ago.
Changing it back is the exact definition of performative work.
Edit: 19 years ago. Almost 2 decades ago!
>Microsoft Office (and Windows) changed the default font more than a decade ago.
You're behind. They've since changed it again. Calibri is no longer the default for Microsoft Office, it's now Aptos. That change was a few years ago.
1 reply →