Research and Papers

Space for Readability: Effects on Reading Speed from Individuated Character and Word Spacing

Space for Readability: Effects on Reading Speed from Individuated Character and Word Spacing

by Readability Matters • January 5, 2023

Research Highlight: Space for Readability: Effects on Reading Speed from Individuated Character and Word Spacing Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting December 2022   The Vision Sciences Society has again highlighted readability work. A peer-reviewed abstract was presented at the VSS conference and published in the 2022 conference proceedings. The research studies the influence of character […]


28 Experts join forces for readability research

Research Highlight: “Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach”

by Readability Matters • January 4, 2023

Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach published in Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction December 12, 2022 “From the moment we wake up to the moment we end our day, we use interfaces built out of the written word. Textual information remains now, as it has for centuries, the cornerstone of human information acquisition. The wide […]


Fonts of Wider Letter Shapes Improve Recognition

Research Highlight: Fonts of Wider Letter Shapes Improve Letter Recognition

by Readability Matters • October 12, 2022

Small Font Changes can Make Significant Differences in Successfully Reading Digital Text   As more and more reading moves from print to digital surfaces, it is important to challenge typographic traditions established when most reading involved printed materials. There is little research about the impact of character width on letter recognition. Digital text is generally […]


Society for the Scientific Study of Reading - Readability Posters

SSSR | Research Results: Improved Student Reading Speed and Comprehension

by Readability Matters • July 19, 2022

Personalized Reading Formats Studied in K-8 Students   Updated: August 30, 2022 Cross-disciplinary research teams delivered posters summarizing their readability research at the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR) annual meeting. The prestigious reading conference reports on all aspects of reading and its related areas, including issues related to word recognition, comprehension, writing, […]


Personalized Font Recommendations: Combining ML and Typographic Guidelines to Optimize Readability

Personalized Font Recommendations with Machine Learning

by Readability Matters • July 18, 2022

Vision Scientists, Data Scientists, and Typographers Collaborate on a New Readability Solutions   At the proceedings of DIS’22, the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), Tianyuan Cai and his colleagues presented their latest research, Personalized Font Recommendations: Combining ML and Typographic Guidelines to Optimize Readability. The study is a collaboration between vision scientists, […]


Towards Individuated Reading Experiences: Different Fonts Increase Reading Speed for Different Individuals Wallace et al., 2021 - ACM TOCHI

Towards Individuated Reading Experiences

by Readability Matters • March 29, 2022

Individuated Reading Experiences Increase Reading Speed without Affecting Comprehension   Readability Matters obtained a pre-print of a forthcoming ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) paper. Shaun Wallace and his colleagues report that participants’ reading speeds (measured in words per minute – WPM) increased by 35% when comparing their fastest and slowest fonts without affecting reading […]


The Readability Consortium announced by University of Central Florida, Adobe, Google and Readability Matters

Readability Matters Announces The Readability Consortium

by Readability Matters • February 15, 2022

Readability Consortium Launches to Inform Next-Generation Reading Solutions The Readability Consortium will explore ways to enable better reading and shift reading outcomes by personalizing text format for the individual. Fort Collins, Feb. 15, 2022 – It is widely accepted that reading is one of the most efficient ways to acquire information, with an estimated 85% […]


Optimizing Electronic Health Records Through Readability

Optimizing Electronic Health Records Through Readability

by Readability Matters • October 14, 2021

Research Highlight: Readability Promises to Improve Medical Outcomes This summer Rachel Ball, Dave Miller, Shaun Wallace and their team submitted their medical readability study in the Proceedings of the 2021 International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care. The promising results point to a future where personalized reading formats could improve reading speed […]


Sneak Peek K-8 Student Readability Research

Sneak Peek: 20% Increase in Student Comprehension

by Readability Matters • August 3, 2021

Readability Formats Yield Significant Results for K-8 Students   Early Results Are In! At the Adobe for Education conference, educator Dr. Susanne Nobles (ReadWorks) presented initial results from the K-8 Readability research study launched last fall. Susanne, together with cognitive scientist Dr. Shannon Sheppard (Chapman University), type designer, professor WSR and researcher Dr. Sofie Beier […]


Readability-Research-An-Interdisciplinary-Approach

Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach

by Readability Matters • July 27, 2021

“Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach” is now available on arXiv!   “Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach” is now available on arXiv, an archival preprint service. Twenty-eight different authors — from around the world and across many disciplines — collaborated to author a 60+ page intro to Readability research toward the goal of accelerating best practices […]