Typeface Legibility for Visually Impaired Readers

Sofie Beier is head of the project, which is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving researchers with backgrounds in design, ophthalmology, psychology and vision science. By combining methods of psychophysics with research-by-design, the aim is to improve typeface legibility for low-vision readers. A tradition within typeface legibility research is to compare the performance of different typeface styles. Such an approach makes it difficult to locate the specific characteristic of a typeface that causes a given variation in legibility.
The project sets out to control for typeface variables by designing the typefaces specifically for the studies and only vary on one feature at a time (e.g. letter weight or letter width). The findings aim to lead to a general improvement of accessibility of information for visually impaired readers in the context of conventional print media, digital media and signage.