More Detail on the 2018 Tech Proof of Concept Test with Adobe In his Adobe MAX 2020 readability presentation, Document Cloud Entrepreneur in Residence, Rick Treitman shared further information about a 2018 Proof of Concept test. As reported, Readability Matters Founders approached Adobe to share Readability insights. Moving from a one-format-fits-all paradigm to one…
Research Highlight Chiron A.T. Oderkerk and Sofie Beier of the Centre for Visibility Design at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark, presented a poster at the June 2020 virtual Vision Sciences Society conference. The study “Fonts of Wider Letter Shapes Improve Recognition in Peripheral Vision,” investigated the effect of font width…
An Instructor Guide Engaging and Motivating College Student Readers through Customizable Reading Text Interface Jenae Cohn, Ph.D., Kathy Crowley, and Marjorie Jordan In higher education today, students access materials for learning in a variety of formats, from print textbooks to e-books, and PDFs. Given the importance of digital environments for delivering core college course…
Can we Accelerate Adult Reading? At the June 2020 virtual Vision Science Society conference, Shaun Wallace presented the results of a collaboration between Brown University, Adobe, and the University of Central Florida. The team studied the impact of fonts on reading effectiveness with the goal of investigating individuation compared to the universality of fonts…
Reading Comprehension is a Critical in Today’s Information-Based Society UC Irvine Study Seeks to Improve Student Outcomes In a 2018 Computers & Education paper, Connor, et al. studied the potential impact of technology on learning opportunities provided in the classroom. The study was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, a part of the…
New Readability Study Finds Personalizing Text Formats Improve Reading Outcomes Published in the proceedings of the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) Conference 2020, was this study of font as a factor in accelerating adult reading. The 63 participants were aged 18-55; they were 12 university students and 51 from digital testing platforms. Those with low…
Study Measures the Differences in Glance-Based Legibility of Eight Sans-Serif Typefaces In a paper published in Ergonomics, the International Journal of Research and Practice in Human Factors and Ergonomics, Sawyer, Dobres, Chahine and Reimer compared differences in glance-based legibility of eight sans-serif typefaces. Their research demonstrates that differences measured in milliseconds are significant in…
University Student Survey of Reading Format Preference Readability Matters invited a professor at a top 75 US University to conduct a quick survey of reading format preference. Thirty-seven students aged 18-21 elected to participate. They were invited to play in the Readability Matters’ Sandbox and to design a format they would like to use…
Readability Researches Study the Impact of Fonts to Improve Reading Outcomes In a newly published paper, researchers from Brown University, Adobe Inc., University of Central Florida, and Riverdale Country School studied the impact of font change on 386 skilled readers, ages 18-71. Readers were evaluated with subsets of sixteen fonts. The results demonstrate that…
Readability Changes Impact Reading Performance Readability Matters advocates for the provision of a full set of Readability Features (including font choice, size, character spacing, character expansion, and line spacing.) Previous Readability Matters research has demonstrated significant numbers of readers benefit from the simple change to a clean round font, such as AvantGarde. Font matters…