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Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

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Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#61

Post by zrobotics »

Y_Y wrote: post #40
splatzone wrote: post #4

Interesting that the memo claims that sans serif fonts are preferred to serif fonts for screen reader users and people with disabilities. I thought the exact opposite was true. Is there any definitive research on which type of font is more accessible?

Am I being thick, or does a screen reader not care what the font is?

One of our employees is blind, and screen readers (JAWS is what he uses) can be fairly finicky. For a case where you are looking at or editing the document in MS Word it doesn't matter, since if the text is readily accessible it will ignore the font. However, in something like a pdf or image it needs to OCR the text, and certain fonts are easier to read.

I happen to know this because we ended up needing to rework our training documentation, which we supply as pdfs that were exported from Word. The screen reader needs to figure out the order of the text in the pdf, and by default word can end up exporting the text laid out in a way that causes the screen reader to parse the text out of order. There are accessibility options that can resolve this, but we ended up changing the font since that resolved the problem without needing to ensure the correct options were set everytime someone needs to update the training manuals.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#63

Post by netsharc »

zadler wrote: post #21

Now if we can get the Chinese factories to replace the nasty old serif font they use for every label…

I'm guessing it's because those were the shapes that were delivered for the Latin characters in one of the earliest CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts, the MingLiU: https://www.pickafont.com/fonts/MingLiU.html

I guess us westerners see it a lot because it was much simpler for the manufacturers to just use 1 font file for all the different locales of the gadgets (either the cheapo MP3-player, or the label printer).

It was even there on Windows 3.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#64

Post by pc86 »

okamiueru wrote: post #24
ivraatiems wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Anthony Blinken knows what a licensed or unlicensed font is?

I would hope someone who don't know the context or effect of a choice they are making, at the least consults with someone who does? This isn't rocket science to get right.

This is such a weird HN-style take. I would bet money the start of this selection was "give me a list of the fonts on all our computers right now" and then they picked one. Probably Calibri after seeing it as the default in some other application.

Nobody at the State Department is diving into the intricacies of font licensure.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#65

Post by belltaco »

Y_Y wrote: post #40
splatzone wrote: post #4

Interesting that the memo claims that sans serif fonts are preferred to serif fonts for screen reader users and people with disabilities. I thought the exact opposite was true. Is there any definitive research on which type of font is more accessible?

Am I being thick, or does a screen reader not care what the font is?

The issue is with OCR. Imagine something that was printed(for being physically signed or filed into a cabinet, for example) and rescanned into an image or PDF. Both printing and scanning is lossy with lots of noise and artifacts. The article is saying that serif fonts are harder to OCR.

For example, something like this https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/6945...

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#68

Post by Poppys »

maxk42 wrote: post #60
okamiueru wrote: post #16

I never understand why someone in charge of making one specific simple choice, ends up making a remarkable dumb decision. Why, unless you are doing things unethically, would you go for a licensed font? It's not like this is a hard problem to solve more than adequately with open and more accessible alternatives.

Aside from licensing, usability studies show that serif fonts are more legible than sans serif fonts, so I have no idea where they came up with the idea that somehow they're harder to read for people with disabilities when all prior research I'm aware of has shown the opposite.

I don't believe that is true anymore, I've seen studies that show that there is little difference between the two.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#69

Post by azalemeth »

maxk42 wrote: post #60
okamiueru wrote: post #16

I never understand why someone in charge of making one specific simple choice, ends up making a remarkable dumb decision. Why, unless you are doing things unethically, would you go for a licensed font? It's not like this is a hard problem to solve more than adequately with open and more accessible alternatives.

Aside from licensing, usability studies show that serif fonts are more legible than sans serif fonts, so I have no idea where they came up with the idea that somehow they're harder to read for people with disabilities when all prior research I'm aware of has shown the opposite.

Yes! This a thousand times. Many universities I know now discourage sans-serif fonts for screen reasons and prefer Arial because one study showed a slight preference for those who were dyslexic. The evidence is far from strong [1] and frankly I feel like doing a meta-analysis of it in my spare time. I really, really, really dislike Arial and find it harder to read than others.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dyslexia%20arial%20font...

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#70

Post by ensignavenger »

valgaze wrote: post #44

Allegedly during Colin Powell’ time at the State Department there was quite an ordeal to change paper sizes for communication between offices: https://www.govexec.com/magazine/2001/06/the-powell-leadersh... “correspondence between headquarters and overseas embassies, known as Diplomatic Notes, for years had to be accompanied by a legal-size (8 1/2-inch by 14-inch) cover sheet. That wasn't really a big deal when the n…

Powell began his term in January of 2001. It isn't clear how "early" in 2001 this change was made, but it seems to have been in process well before the Powell term as SoS and only completed shortly after he took office.
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