/readability-group-survey

Not my work – Results from The Readability Group’s survey, as presented at Axe Con 2021

The Readability Group – Don’t believe the type @ Axe Con 2021

🚧 Not my work – Results from The Readability Group’s survey, as presented at Axe Con 2021.

Are “accessible” fonts actually as accessible as they claim? If not, what are the things we need to know when choosing a font that responds to different reader needs? This session will explore what dyslexia is, what cognitively happens when we read, and what elements of a typeface make a difference to how accessible it is, and to whom. Bruno, David, and Gareth have decades of experience between them. Bruno as a Typeface Designer, David as a Typographer, and Gareth as a UX Design/Accessibility expert. Together they spent over 3 years researching and steering the creation of BBC Reith family, the BBC’s corporate accessible typeface.

👉 View the full presentation in accessible Markdown/HTML

Summary results

All of the information in this section is from a LinkedIn post by Gareth Ford Williams, verbatim but with more text formatting.

20 Fonts, 2022 test participants, each font evaluated 16,800 times each over 7,000 study hours.

Summary:

All participants

Starting with the top level of all participants, including those with disabilities, the best and the worst performers were:

Best performers

  1. SF Pro 69%
  2. Segoe UI 65%
  3. BBC Reith Sans 64%
  4. Verdana 64%
  5. Red Hat Text 62%
  6. Atkinson Hyperlegible 62%

Worst performers

  1. Lexie Readable 39%
  2. Sylexiad Sans 34%
  3. Comic Sans 22%
  4. Dyslexie 22%
  5. Open Dyslexic 12%

Atkinson did well but no better than 3 other fonts that are all freely available too. Both the Apple and Microsoft system fonts performed the best.

Participants who had strong phonetic dyslexic traits

For the participants who had strong phonetic dyslexic traits, the sample size was 253.

Best performers

  1. BBC Reith Sans 65%
  2. SF Pro 65%
  3. Verdana 64%
  4. Segoe UI 62%
  5. Lexend Decca 62%

Worst performers

  1. Times New Roman 36%
  2. Sylexiad Sans 36%
  3. Dyslexie 30%
  4. Comic Sans 28%
  5. Open Dyslexic 18%

Interesting things include an uplift in the worst group which needs further study, but it's not significant, and seeing Times New Roman performing better than any of the fonts recommended for dyslexia casts doubt both on their accessibility claims and also the common belief that serifs are bad news. In the top performing group both the BBC and Apple just came out on top but there was little between the top 5.

Participants with significant poor near vision

The group that includes people with significant poor near vision had a sample size of 372.

Best performers

  1. SF Pro 68%
  2. Segoe UI 66%
  3. BBC Reith Sans 65%
  4. Verdana 64%
  5. Red Hat Text 63%

Worst performers

  1. Lexie Readable 41%
  2. Times New Roman 41%
  3. Sylexiad Sans 36%
  4. Comic Sans 25%
  5. Dyslexie 24%
  6. Open Dyslexic 12%

Something to remember when considering font performance is that the more we are exposed to a font the more our brain gets used to it and the more readable it becomes. However the system fonts and common fonts were tested across all platforms so bias to a greater degree should have been levelled out.

The claims that Comic Sans, Dyslexie and Open Dyslexic are accessible choices should be pretty much finished off by this data, however Atkinson did very well as a general font and we just off the top 5 in the accessibility categories, so it works.

One last thing to note is that Helvetica never found itself anywhere near the top 5, which shows 2 things. Users were not clicking on what they see every day, and as it performed particularly badly with both dyslexic and vision impaired participants, maybe as a font we can finally say for certain that it is not fit for any digital environment.

The data gathered in this study will be released later in 2022.

Additional articles

Credits

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