[293/366] Hyperlegible

[cosmolinguist]

The other day, mother_bones told me about a "hyperlegible" font the Braille Institute in the USA has developed. Even in my day of Terrible Computer, I managed to download it and change the font on Firefox. I was pretty impressed: refreshing the page made it look like the words had popped out at me.

Legibility is so interesting to me. It's more art than science: what's more legible for one person will be The Worst for someone else, and that's especially true for visually impaired people. It's really interesting (for me, anyway) to read about what they changed and why: recognizability, differentiation, exaggeration, removing ambiguity, so much thought went into increasing distinctiveness and recognition.

Anyway, seeing me struggle with the terrible computer inspired diffrentcolours to put Linux back on it for me, so my brief university-mandated foray with Windows is basically over! (I've kept it around since I won't get the thousands of pounds of software back again and some of it is actually useful, but I'm not actually in need of it very often.) We had a look at the accessibility stuff these days (which turns out to maybe be a little more impressive on his KDE setup than my current one which is GNOME...) and it really has come on a long way: definitely enough to be worth switching to for everyday stuff. I'm impressed at how well magnification is integrated; I haven't used the screenreader a lot yet but it seems okay). And it was actually only about as annoying to change the system fonts on GNOME as it was on Windows! So now everything is nice and legible for me here. I'm just sad I can't figure out how to use this font on my phone.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for the font link!

It definitely addresses the drawbacks to sans (I'm a serif fan myself because the little pointy bits give my wandering eyes more data. My visual fatigue ends up like super slow nystagmus.)

I'm also glad that different blindness groups supply diff fonts -- I'd love to see a side by side with RNIB's Tiresias as well as the highly readable and yet butt ugly Dyslexie, which is a one-person joint.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I strongly prefer sans serif because the serifs are too much data for my easily-fatigued eyes. But it is good to have the capital I's more distinct from the lowercase l's and all that sort of thing.

Tiresias seems to have some similar principles but to my inexpert eye "doesn't go as far," it's more similar to an ordinary Verdana-type font and doesn't seem quite as readable. But as I say that's no objective most-legible font for everyone, everybody benefits from different things.

[diffrentcolours]

I'm not sure that the KDE screen magnifier / screen reader integration is better than the Gnome equivalent. It's just that (a) KDE gives you more shiny configuration options up front like changing the accents and (b) I was driving the KDE one while you've had to figure out Gnome yourself :)

I am interested in what you were saying about "proper" screen readers using collections of sounds / recordings rather than speech synthesis - I have no idea whether there's anything like that in FOSS land, but if there is I'd be happy to provide a set of recordings for it under an appropriate Free license.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh cool. I really don't know enough about it myself to know how it's done or how easy it'd be to contribute to.

And you make good points about KDE vs. Gnome, but I can't even change the mouse cursor color without downloading more themes and I think that shouldn't be that way. :)

[otter]

I don't know much about these things, except that it sounds like you have more accessible computer use now. Yay

[cosmolinguist]

Differently accessible, anyway. :) And mostly easier to use.

[momentsmusicaux]

That font looks really interesting. Though I can't figure out what's being shown in the diagram with the yellow strokes behind the black ones.

[barakta]

I didn't know about either of these fonts so I have installed both and will have a play. I know I tend to use weird fonts like trebuchet which is somehow easier with my weird vision. I will also let a visually impaired friend know about them in case they work well for him.