Yeah, I would agree: it is well known that Arial is the most read­able type­face…

I would like to sug­gest that Arial is the most read type­face by being bun­dled with the Win­dows OS, rather than the most read­able one.

Funny that con­sid­er­ing the topic of the post that the web page doesn’t render char­ac­ter spac­ing at all well (from my view at least).

This of course is largely depen­dent on oper­a­tion system, mon­i­tor, browser soft­ware etc. I think com­par­a­tive stud­ies have been con­ducted. :)

Actu­ally, I think the the char­ac­ter spac­ing is about as good as your going to get for a web font, as Geor­gia is the most read­able screen font avail­able.

Also, Arial is ripped off Grotesk junk, made as the generic Hel­vetica, and is only used because it ships with Win­dows. And if I were going to use a san serif for screen view I would throw Arial away and use Ver­dana, as it is the most read­able screen font.

Ver­dana is really awful at bigger sizes for head­lines, though. Ugh. No matter how com­pelling the con­tent, I reject sites that use Ver­dana in head­lines. Arial isn’t great, but it’s better than Ver­dana.

Well, Ver­dana is specif­i­cally designed for text use, hence it looks at its best in small point sizes, while Arial works better in larger sizes. This is why The Font­Feed opted for Arial for head­ers.

@Colin Hall: Lol, that’s what I thought too. I used to use this font for my blog, but then I realised it was dif­fi­cult to read and changed it to Tre­buchet MS instead.

MS Tre­buchet has the poten­tial to be a good human­ist sans for web, but IMHO the low­er­case “a” looks out of bal­ance, and the “g” is yucky. But that’s just me. ;)

@klaas - actu­ally, many stud­ies have con­cluded that serif type­faces are more read­able than sans, so I can’t imag­ine a poor qual­ity ripoff sans font ever being the most read­able.

My com­ment about Arial was meant as bit of a joke. How­ever, spurred on by all this, I stepped into a colleague’s office who has dyslexia to ask her what the most read­able font was in her opin­ion. Her answer was that Arial is def­i­nitely the most read­able (at least as com­pared to Times). Has there been an actual study of read­abil­ity? If so, where is it? If not, maybe it’s time to do a (rea­son­ably sci­en­tific) study com­par­ing the read­abil­ity of var­i­ous fonts cor­rected for spac­ing, lead­ing, x-height (…), colour of paper (…..)? To put in a my own 10 cents’ worth on read­abil­ity, I per­son­ally prefer slab serifs such as Chap­ar­ral.

I have not read the arti­cle. You have to pay for it.

When dis­cussing this, we must clearly (ha) say whether we are talk­ing about leg­i­bil­ity or read­abil­ity? On a mon­i­tor or in print? Dis­play or text sizes? etc.

Ver­dana is infi­nitely better than Arial for text for both print and mon­i­tor. Arial is too con­densed — it slows read­ing and is not as well dis­cerned on a pixel-​based mon­i­tor at text sizes. More­over, as one ages, the con­densed nature of the font becomes more prob­lem­atic.

Hence, Ver­dana wins by a land­slide because of its more “normal” char­ac­ter pro­por­tions.

I like what Josef Go-​Oco and Joseph Sims said on Nov. 25.

keep in mind that when you’re talk­ing about leg­i­bil­ity, you have to think of a lot more than what’s on the page/screen. For exam­ple a simple thing as the reader’s age greatly reduces leg­i­bil­ity.

http://​www.​aiga.​org/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​.​c​f​m​/​t​y​p​o​g​r​a​p​h​y​-​a​n​d​-​t​h​e​-​a​g​i​n​g-eye

As every­thing in typog­ra­phy, it is actu­ally a con­ju­ga­tion of fac­tors. Scale has limits, just like weight, track­ing and kern­ing. The goal is to bal­ance the strength of every item. Typog­ra­phy is a team work, though the most dif­fi­cult part is the spac­ing. You may have the per­fect type­face for the job, with the per­fect weight and body size, but if the spac­ing fails, every other choice is com­pro­mised.

Inter­est­ing thoughts, but I’d like to sug­gest expand­ing the con­ver­sa­tion to typog­ra­phy in other-than-electronic media. Envi­ron­men­tal and print graphic design­ers rely on con­spicu­ity as much as leg­i­bil­ity and plain old good spelling to do good work. Check out http://​www.​clearviewhwy.com for a fine review of some in-​depth research and devel­op­ment on making a font go to work.

My old eyes are offended by low con­trast. Even a person with 20/20 tested with a high con­trast test card may have trou­ble with low con­trast of the same size. We don’t have a good handle on this..I have in mind a way to find out what people can read by assem­bling exam­ples of printed mate­r­ial that comes to me in the mail: ads, cor­re­spon­dence, mag­a­zines and newspoapers. Pro­duce a one page dis­play of the vari­ety of con­trasts and sizes and have people read them where they nor­mally read and mark which give them trou­ble. Add it all up and you get the per­cent of the sample pop­u­la­tion that can read each sample.
This is not six sigma work. It is an expe­di­ent to let the pop­u­la­tion tell us “This is Ok; this is not. It might put an end to the cur­rent prac­tice of using pale ink on pale paper. gfmueden@verizon.net ===gm===

Good arti­cle.

There is a thought­ful piece on typog­ra­phy as it relates to dyslexia at http://​www.​rob​s​fonts.​com/​s​y​l​e​x​i​a​d​p​r​o​p​o​s​a​l​.html - and better than the usual ‘use arial’, some­thing I’ve always been doubt­ful about.

@G F Muer­den
Just as a quick note on con­trast, WCAG2.0 gives some spe­cific guid­ance on it. For exam­ple, look­ing just at greys on white, #969696 or darker is the rec­om­mended min­i­mum con­trast for large text (head­ings etc), with #777 the best prac­tice for large text, and the rec­om­mended min­i­mum for body text. #595959 is the best prac­tice min­i­mum con­trast for body text.