Towards Individuated Reading Experiences: Different Fonts Increase Reading Speed for Different Individuals

Abstract

In our age of ubiquitous digital displays, adults often read in short, opportunistic interludes. In this context of Interlude Reading , we consider if manipulating font choice can improve adult readers’ reading outcomes. Our studies normalize font size by human perception and use hundreds of crowdsourced participants to provide a foundation for understanding, which fonts people prefer and which fonts make them more effective readers. Participants’ reading speeds (measured in words-per-minute (WPM)) increased by 35% when comparing fastest and slowest fonts without affecting reading comprehension. High WPM variability across fonts suggests that one font does not fit all. We provide font recommendations related to higher reading speed and discuss the need for individuation, allowing digital devices to match their readers’ needs in the moment. We provide recommendations from one of the most significant online reading efforts to date. To complement this, we release our materials and tools with this article.

Personalized Font Recommendations: Combining ML and Typographic Guidelines to Optimize Readability

“…Prior work has studied the efect of font characteristics or font family on reading speed [5, 7, 9, 13, 15-18, 67, 70, 73, 97], often using well-studied fonts, such as Arial and Verdana [5, 12-14, 46, 58, 97, 98]. Recent work incorporated newer fonts designed for digital screens, such as Roboto and Open Sans [90]. Additionally, based on Kadner et al's recommendation to include typography experts in-the-loop [47], we collaborate with typographers to select fonts well-suited for digital reading to explore the efect of various font characteristics on reading performance.…”

“…Beyond font size manipulations, growing evidence suggests that personalizing reading formats can have signifcant impacts on reading performance [12,90,93]. For example, non-proft Readability Matters conducted a study showing that diferent text formats (a combination of font choices and spacing) increased accurate reading speed among adult readers by 20% or more [29].…”

“…For example, non-proft Readability Matters conducted a study showing that diferent text formats (a combination of font choices and spacing) increased accurate reading speed among adult readers by 20% or more [29]. Other recent work showed that, with the right font, individuals could potentially read 25% faster [90]. These works propose that individual readers need to be matched with their fastest font, just like an eye doctor might prescribe reading glasses unique to an individual.…”

“…With over 800,000 digital fonts available [30] and an evolving set of digital devices, fnding individuals' fastest fonts to redesign their text presents a unique challenge [90]. Prior readability research has studied popular fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman [12,73] and individual font characteristics such as line and character spacing [2,41,73].…”

“…Our contributions include: (1) FontView, a web application for extracting font characteristics that afect reading; (2) a crowdsourced reading dataset containing the results of 252 individuals reading in 8 diferent fonts, along with the relevant demographics and performance information; (3) a population analysis replicating prior results showing personalizing font choice can increase reading speed [90,93]; (4) the FontMART model to provide personalized font recommendations; (5) quantitative and qualitative analyses of the font and reader characteristics that infuence reading speed. We share FontView, FontMART, and our reading dataset 1 .…”