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…
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,…
Vision Scientists, Data Scientists, and Typographers Collaborate on 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, data…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
“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…
Fluency Growth Stalled The Center for Policy Analysis for California Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education evaluated changes in Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) for students in early elementary school. Their goal was to understand changes that may have occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report states that reading skills…
The World Needs The Next Gutenberg Press Personalized Reading Formats Will Improve Reading Outcomes for Everyone, Everywhere Readability Matters celebrates Dr. Clayton Christensen’s influential business ideas and his thought leadership in improving the world through disruptive innovation. Readability Matters posits that personalized reading formats are the next disruptive innovation in reading technology. The next generation…