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Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability

oliviaking.com

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Re: Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability

#41

Post by markhnthoraway »

seydor wrote: post #33

Is there evidence that this is more legible? Because we don't read individual characters (but chunks) so making them individually distinguishable doesn't seem like it would have much of an effect.

In the part where the claim is made that individual characters matter there's a footnote link that ultimately goes to this PDF thesis[1].

That thesis has a claim itself:

> Creating a well designed, legible typeface is therefore not about creating dissimilar characters; the aim must be to find, amongst other things, an optimal balance between uniformity and differentiation and, through that, to attain legibility

At the end of the related chapter, where the author surveys some studies about letter and word recognition. It seems like the distinctions made in this font may be informed by that kind of perspective - not that increased differentiation of characters is good on its own.

This is just at a glance but it seems there is at least a thread there to follow about evidence and reasoning.

[1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/40037679.pdf

Re: Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability

#42

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

ppbjj wrote: post #11
kps wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not because of the hue, but because the page doesn't respect `prefers-color-scheme`, which makes it hard to take any claim of ‘accessibility’ seriously. Edit: nor `prefers-reduced-motion`, neither.

Oh, come on. They're using Squarespace. Maybe complain about the state of WYSIWYG editors before dismissing someone's work.

Why did they need a WYSIWYG editor to lay out static content in an entirely standard format? That could be done in Markdown, or plain html. These have the advantage of being trivial to handle with accessibility layers.

Re: Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability

#43

Post by stonogo »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #28
Gualdrapo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised by the number of people who does that. Not everyone has a fancy browser and not everyone can see .

If you cannot see, what use is a font?

And what if you arrive at the site not knowing it's about a font? How are you supposed to find out?

Re: Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability

#44

Post by microflash »

It does look pleasant to me. But the x-height is not large enough which makes it harder to be legible on smaller text sizes. Also, lack of additional weights discourages me to use it on any webpage. I'd have given it a shot if a bold weight were also present.

Inter (with disambiguation features enabled) [1], Atkinson Hyperlegible [2], and IBM Plex Sans [3] are still better fonts to me.

[1]: https://rsms.me/inter/

[2]: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont

[3]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/

Re: Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability

#47

Post by csande17 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #40

This font looks radically different on my two monitors, being significantly worse on my 'standard' DPI monitor compared to my other high DPI monitor. On my main, 1x monitor, the lowercase i has an anti-aliased "half pixel" at the bottom that extends past the baseline. A few other characters have this, but it's especially noticable on the lowcase i.

The font could definitely use some technical tweaking for issues like that -- the kerning on "qu" also stands out as a problem.

It looks like this is the author's first attempt at making a font, though, and by that standard it's pretty good!

Re: Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability

#48

Post by smeej »

andy99 wrote: post #14
nolongerthere wrote: post #6

Did anyone else find the green background and the white text clash in a way that made it difficult to read? I found that ironic given the article.

Yeah I still can't tell if I'm just overanalyzing because it's supposed to be easy to read, but I found the webpage, especially the italicized bit, pretty jarring, even in contrast with my usual squinting at HN's tiny font on my phone.

I did too, and I've been sight-reading without thinking about it since preschool. I'm really unaccustomed to having to look hard at a word to see what it says, and that was the only way I could get through this page.
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