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Don’t Believe the Type! (video, 50m)

• I discovered this axe-con 2021 video via Richard Morton’s tweet. I thought it would be good to follow-up on the piece I wrote about the Hyperlegible font.
• The presentation, by Gareth Ford Williams, David Bailey and Bruno Maag, talks through the data they’ve gathered from around 7,000 hours of user research. They conclude that some so-called ‘accessible’ fonts such as “Open Dyslexic” actually perform worse than standard fonts like Helvetica. However, some accessible fonts perform better, including Atkinson Hyperlegible and BBC Reith Sans.
• That said, the poor performing fonts “may have fallen into the ‘I hate Comic Sans’ trap”, as they all look quite exaggerated. The top performers were all sans serif fonts.
• The presenters admit that the survey raises lots of questions, rather than giving lots of answers! But TLDR: that ‘accessible’ font you’re using may not be as accessible as you think.

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