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Legibility

Summary

Legibility is the ease with which a reader can decode symbols. In addition to written language, it can also refer to behaviour[1] or architecture,[2] for example. From the perspective of communication research, it can be described as a measure of the permeability of a communication channel. A large number of known factors can affect legibility.

In everyday language, legibility is commonly used as a synonym for readability. In graphic design, however, legibility is often distinguished from readability. Readability is the ease with which a reader can follow and understand words, sentences and paragraphs. While legibility usually refers to the visual clarity of individual symbols, readability is more about their arrangement or even the choice of words.[3][4] Legibility is a component of readability.[citation needed]

The legibility of text is most often examined by controlled deterioration of viewing conditions and determination of threshold detection.[5]

Not all writing benefits from optimizing for legibility. Texts that are supposed to be eye-catching or whose appearance is supposed to hold certain connotations could deliberately deviate from easy legibility for these purposes. Corresponding typefaces are called display typefaces.[6]

Influencing factors edit

The legibility of visual displays (e.g. text) depends on:

  • environmental conditions or interferences, such as lighting or vibrations (e.g. from walking), which affect the human visual system[7]
  • the viewing distance (i.e. the angular size of the symbols)
  • the font design[8]
  • the reproduction quality (e.g. sufficient brightness contrast between symbols and their background), which may be limited by the technology of the presentation medium
  • abilities and fitness of the readers

While a difference in viewing distance equally affects the angular size of symbols and their optical resolution, the former has a much greater effect on legibility.[5]

A few decades ago, screens were less legible than print on paper, but this is no longer true with newer screens.[5]

It has been shown that threshold legibility performance correlates inversely with the age of the readers. Older readers are disproportionately affected by other adverse factors in visual design, such as small text size.[9]

Typography edit

"The legibility of a typeface is related to the characteristics inherent in its design … which relate to the ability to distinguish one letter from the other."[6] Aspects of type design that affect legibility include "x-height, character shapes, stroke contrast, the size of its counters, serifs or lack thereof, and weight."[6] Other typographic factors that affect legibility include font choice, angular size (point size vs. viewing distance), kerning, cases used, tracking, line length, leading, and justification.[citation needed]

While readers may like or dislike fonts based on the familiarity of their appearance, they nevertheless achieve a comparable reading performance after a short period of familiarization with a new typeface, provided that the glyphs are equally clear and exhibit the essential features of the represented letter.[10]

Reducing the stroke width below a certain point impairs legibility. Italic type is read more slowly.

At the same point size, capital letters are easier to read in Latin script; but this is reversed if the cap height of the capitals is adjusted to the x-height of the lowercase letters (in which case the lower case letters take up more space due to their ascenders and descenders.)[5]

The relative legibility of words in uppercase vs. words in lowercase has long been debated.[11][12][13][14]

Despite contrary opinions, serifs have little observable influence on reading speed. At low resolution, the additional spacing between letters required for the serifs seems to improve legibility, whereas otherwise they have a slightly adverse effect.[15] For special groups, the picture may look different: the dyslexics community[clarification needed] seems to be convinced that serifs are unnecessary visual clutter, which makes the text less accessible and makes the letter shapes deviate more from the simpler forms known from school. Another study found serifs to be detrimental for reading speed at low resolution.[16]

Eye tracker studies support the theory that increasing complexity of shapes reduces legibility.[17] The addition of vowel marks in Arabic script has contradictory effects, but appears to be detrimental to legibility overall.[17] Freestanding letters are easier to recognize than ones with adjacent elements; this is known as crowding effect.[5]

Common measures to improve legibility at lowest resolution include the use of wide apertures/large open counters, large x-height, low stroke variability, big features, etc., while some improvements like ink traps[clarification needed] are specific to different presentation media.[18] The positive effect of more open apertures could be experimentally confirmed for the opening of the lowercase e, but not for the larger opening of the lowercase c. Narrow letter shapes such as f, j, l and i usually benefit from larger tails that widen their shape, except for the lowercase f.[10]

Dyslexics and learners edit

While a large x-height is generally considered helpful for legibility at low resolutions, the dyslexics community holds the theory that short ascenders/descenders tend to cause confusion. Dyslexics and learners also seem to prefer less regularity between individual letterforms, especially further differentiating features in glyphs that are often just mirrored versions of other letters, as in the group b, d, p and q, since the human brain seems to have evolved to recognize (symmetrical) three-dimensional objects regardless of their orientation in space.[19][20] This is the basis for some of the most devout endorsements of the otherwise much hated Comic Sans typeface.[21] Other important aspects seem to be the familiarity of the glyph shapes, the absence of serifs and looser spacing.[22][23] While textbook versions perform better with inexperienced readers/learners, most experienced readers seem to be more comfortable with the traditional two-story print forms for a and g.[24][25]

Further reading edit

  • Beier, Sofie (2012). Reading letters : designing for legibility. Amsterdam: BIS. ISBN 978-90-6369-271-1. OCLC 751739979. (based on her doctoral thesis)

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Dragan, Anca D.; Lee, Kenton C.T.; Srinivasa, Siddhartha S. (March 2013). Legibility and Predictability of Robot Motion (PDF). ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Tokyo, Japan.
  2. ^ Weisman, Jerry (March 1981). "Evaluating Architectural Legibility". Environment and Behavior. 13 (2): 189–204. Bibcode:1981EnvBe..13..189W. doi:10.1177/0013916581132004. ISSN 0013-9165. S2CID 107939568.
  3. ^ Tracy, Walter (1986). Letters of credit : a view of type design. London: David R. Godine. pp. 30–32.
  4. ^ Lieberman, J. Ben (1967). Types of typefaces and how to recognize them. New York: Sterling Publishing Co. pp. 85–127.
  5. ^ a b c d e Sheedy, James E.; Subbaram, Manoj V.; Zimmerman, Aaron B.; Hayes, John R. (December 2005). "Text Legibility and the Letter Superiority Effect". Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. 47 (4): 797–815. doi:10.1518/001872005775570998. ISSN 0018-7208. PMID 16553067. S2CID 207496095.
  6. ^ a b c Strizver, Ilene (2010). Type Rules: The Designer's Guide to Professional Typography (3rd ed.). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-470-54251-4.
  7. ^ Mustonen, Terhi; Olkkonen, Maria; Hakkinen, Jukka (2004). "Examining mobile phone text legibility while walking". Extended abstracts of the 2004 conference on Human factors and computing systems - CHI '04. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. p. 1243. doi:10.1145/985921.986034. ISBN 1-58113-703-6.
  8. ^ Smith, Sidney L. (December 1979). "Letter Size and Legibility". Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. 21 (6): 661–670. doi:10.1177/001872087912210604. ISSN 0018-7208. S2CID 110208067.
  9. ^ Dobres, Jonathan; Chahine, Nadine; Reimer, Bryan; Gould, David; Mehler, Bruce; Coughlin, Joseph F. (2016-03-04). "Utilising psychophysical techniques to investigate the effects of age, typeface design, size and display polarity on glance legibility". Ergonomics. 59 (10). Informa UK Limited: 1377–1391. doi:10.1080/00140139.2015.1137637. ISSN 0014-0139. PMC 5213401. PMID 26727912.
  10. ^ a b Beier, Sofie (May 2009). Typeface Legibility: Towards defining familiarity (PDF) (PhD thesis). Royal College of Art.
  11. ^ Michael S. Wogalter, editor. "Handbook of Warnings". 2006. p. 395.
  12. ^ Kevin Larson. "The science of word recognition".
  13. ^ Susan Weinschenk. "It’s a Myth That All Capital Letters Are Inherently Harder to Read".
  14. ^ Diana C. Reep. "Technical Writing: Principles, Strategies, and Readings". 1997. p. 455.
  15. ^ Arditi, Aries; Cho, Jianna (2005-11-01). "Serifs and font legibility". Vision Research. 45 (23): 2926–2933. doi:10.1016/j.visres.2005.06.013. ISSN 0042-6989. PMC 4612630. PMID 16099015.
  16. ^ Robert A. Morris, Kathy Aquilante, Dean Yager, Charles Bigelow, 2002: Serifs Slow RSVP Reading at Very Small Sizes, but Don't Matter at Larger Sizes, DOI: 10.1889/1.1830242, http://cs.umb.edu/~ram/rsvp/publications/serifssubmittedv2.doc
  17. ^ a b Campbell-Dollaghan, Kelsey (2013-01-30). "Could Good Type Design Promote Literacy In The Middle East?". Fast Company. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  18. ^ Alpaca, U. X. (2016-11-01). "What to watch out for when working on typography for print and web". Medium. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  19. ^ "Legibility and readability issues". EUfont.eu. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  20. ^ Broschüre: Schriftarten für legasthene Menschen (in German). Erster Österreichischer Dachverband Legasthenie. 2013-07-19.
  21. ^ Baer, Drake (2017-03-07). "The Reason Comic Sans Is a Public Good". The Cut. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  22. ^ Zorzi, M.; Barbiero, C.; Facoetti, A.; Lonciari, I.; Carrozzi, M.; Montico, M.; Bravar, L.; George, F.; Pech-Georgel, C.; Ziegler, J. C. (2012-06-04). "Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (28): 11455–11459. doi:10.1073/pnas.1205566109. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3396504. PMID 22665803.
  23. ^ Rello, Luz; Baeza-Yates, Ricardo (21 October 2013). "Good fonts for dyslexia" (PDF). Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. pp. 1–8. doi:10.1145/2513383.2513447. ISBN 9781450324052. S2CID 4953793. Retrieved 17 November 2022.
  24. ^ Sassoon, Rosemary (1993). "Through the eyes of a child: perception and type design". Computers and typography. Oxford, England: Intellect. pp. 150–. ISBN 1-871516-23-4. OCLC 27468183.
  25. ^ Beier, Sofie; Larson, Kevin (2010-06-01). "Design Improvements for Frequently Misrecognized Letters 1". Information Design Journal. 18 (2). John Benjamins Publishing Company: 118–137. doi:10.1075/idj.18.2.03bei. ISSN 0142-5471.

External links edit

 
Look up legibility in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
  • Jeremy York (November 2008). "Legibility and Large-Scale Digitization" (PDF). Hathitrust Digital Library. Retrieved 12 August 2012.

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