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Comment by dartharva | Hacker News Reader

I am astigmatic. I tried taking off my glasses and reading this page side-by-side against a Substack article zoomed in at the same font size at a distance. I could not make any difference in ease of reading or legibility, I struggled roughly equally for both of them. What am I missing?

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I find this with a lot of assistive fonts, that they have claims but no research that says "Yes, this makes a dramatic difference". For example, the OpenDyslexic font I've never seen any research that it make any more difference yet I see people act like it's an answer. Big text is easier to read.

I attended a talk given on this font at an assistive technology conference recently. This seems to actually have a body of evidence demonstrating its benefits in specific use cases. Also from a design standpoint it truly is superior to alternatives. Things like dyslexia fonts are largely considered entirely ineffective in the field

Nothing. Most typefaces are already pretty good at being legible, so we are talking about marginal gains here. A font like that where usually similar-looking characters are easily distinguished shines more when applied e.g. in forms or other applications where precise input is required.

I can’t see without my glasses so I didn’t try. But I have a huge myopia, not perfectly corrected astigmatism (like, it’s fine but glasses can’t correct it perfectly) and on top of that, I have amblyopia (which you can approximate by : my brain learned to use only one eye).

And I do find Atkinson hyperlegible more … legible. Not life changing since my vision is still ok and I’m still young.

And I find it interesting because with my mix of conditions, my issues aren’t seeing clearly (I see clearly with my glasses) but eye strain. I can have a day where I see clearly in the morning and blurry at night. Anything that reduces this strain changes my life. And, maybe it’s placebo, but I feel like this font helps.

Subtle differences are not that easy to compare. You would have to test reading and comprehension speed and also while skimming and searching information.

If some font, color, or UI feature provides 1-5% improvement, it's huge because it accumulates over long term, but it's hard to notice immediately.

Thats interesting because I arrived at the same conclusion.

At first glance for me it really seemed like its a font strait out of a elementary grade level textbook. Maybe its the website layout, maybe its that the font is huge and spaced the same, I'm not sure.

As far as easier to read, I am on the fence versus monospaced computer fonts if its any better or not. I wonder what their research behind this is but the website started to bug me so I didnt dig deeper personally

I don't know if it's actually easier to read in a sentence compared to the standard of Frutiger and Frutiger-likes. That's what you'll likely see on your medicine packaging and train- and road signs. It does try to be unambiguous by differentiating glyphs, which can be helpful with some standalone words.

What fonts do you like?

In general? Roboto comes to mind. Hack for monospace.

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