Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability
64 points by disadvantage 1 year ago | 61 comments- Etheryte 1 year agoAny font that's designed for accessibility should always run an actual study to measure whether they managed to hit their mark or not. There's countless fonts out there designed to ameliorate dyslexia and other similar conditions that are in practice actually worse than a regular font, despite best intentions. This is something you can measure, you don't have to guess.
- mikae1 1 year ago> Any font that's designed for accessibility should always run an actual study to measure whether they actually hit their mark or not.
- RobotToaster 1 year agoWhy does it want my e-mail? It doesn't seem very inclusive to require a signup just to download a font.
Also no information on the licence that I could see.
- echoangle 1 year agoIt’s available on google fonts.
- echoangle 1 year ago
- RobotToaster 1 year ago
- jcotton42 1 year agoIt is not a good sign that the first thing on that site is an eye-searing white-on-red banner.
- mikae1 1 year ago
- tzmlab 1 year agoAnother great accessible font – Atkinson Hyperlegible [0]
- rob74 1 year agoActually I like that one better! For instance, Inclusive Sans boasts about its "clear distinction between I [uppercase i], l [lowercase L] and 1", but the lowercase L is just a vertical bar, so might as well be mistaken for an I if there is no I to compare it to. In Atkinson Hyperlegible, the lowercase L has a slight "tail" which helps distinguish it - and the serifs on the uppercase i feel a bit less jarring.
- jszymborski 1 year agoIt is a bit weird that Inclusive Sans' lower case L doesn't have a tail considering this font is very "tail-forward" for lack of a better word.
The thing that irks me the most about Atkinson Hyperlegible is that there is no medium weight and the bold weight is way too heavy for many applications. I also just kinda like the way Inclusive Sans looks more, but the Atkinson letterforms are definitely easily identified even when blurred.
- kibwen 1 year agoAgreed, the font has a lot of playful character without giving away that it was designed for a specific functional purpose. And it looks like it's freely licensed as well, so not only is it free to use, but it's also free to ship alongside things.
However, note that it does feature mirrored "b" and "d", which can be difficult to distinguish for people with dyslexia.
- rob74 1 year agoThat's probably because they focus on people with low vision - but yeah, they could have added the same "tail" which the lowercase L has to the lowercase D too, that wouldn't have felt out of place...
- extra88 1 year agoAtkinson Hyperlegible does have a tail on the 'd' but it's much more subtle than the one on the 'l'. As mentioned, its main priority is low vision, not dyslexia.
- rob74 1 year ago
- jszymborski 1 year ago
- mikae1 1 year agoAnd Lexend[1][2].
- geraldwhen 1 year agoEasily a superior font.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1 year agoAnything in monospace?
- wittjeff 1 year agoI talked to someone from BI last week at a conference, who said that they're working on a monospace version.
- microflash 1 year agoJetBrains Mono?
- wittjeff 1 year ago
- rob74 1 year ago
- nolongerthere 1 year agoDid anyone else find the green background and the white text clash in a way that made it difficult to read? I found that ironic given the article.
- eadmund 1 year ago> Did anyone else find the green background and the white text clash in a way that made it difficult to read?
No, but only because with Javascript disabled there is literally nothing but an olive green page. Truly remarkable, given that it is supposed to be inclusive.
- pqdbr 1 year agoThis is an honest question: are you browsing the web in 2024 with javascript disabled?
- Gualdrapo 1 year agoYou'd be surprised by the number of people who does that. Not everyone has a fancy browser and not everyone can see.
- GuB-42 1 year agoEven if almost no one disables Javascript because the web is unfortunately hardly usable without it, it show that absolutely no fucks are given.
There is no reason for Javascript to be required on that page, it is static and should be nothing more than a simple HTML file with a few images, the font and a style sheet. It is slow on a decent desktop PC with a fiber connection, I can't imagine on an old smartphone. Recently featured on HN: https://danluu.com/slow-device/
But maybe we shouldn't blame the author too much, she is using Squarespace, that's the kind of service people use when they don't want to deal with these technical details. But Squarespace should know better and be ashamed of delivering such crap to their customers.
- eadmund 1 year ago> are you browsing the web in 2024 with javascript disabled?
I use uMatrix to disable most Javascript by default, and enable sources one-by-one if necessary for a web app. There’s no need to use Javascript on a blog post, certainly not to dynamically load in HTML text and images, so I generally don’t even bother to enable it, and just hit the back button.
The way I look at it is, a web interaction is a conversation: my browser asks a server for a resource, and the server returns it. This makes sense for static HTML: ‘server, please send me this blog post’; ‘sure, here you go, and here are some images or fonts or whatever to make it prettier.’ This, OTOH, feels just wrong: ‘server, please send me this blog post’; ‘sure, here is this list of instructions for you to follow to assemble to blog post.’
Web apps are fine, Javascript is fine for that. Forcing the use of Javascript to do what HTML already can do natively is just wrong.
- MrVandemar 1 year agoNot the parent, but, why yes! I AM browsing the web in 2024 with javascript disabled. It's a technology that adds no value to any of the content I am interested in, you know, just reading -- content that can be expressed in HTML tags without being injected into a DOM.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...
- Gualdrapo 1 year ago
- pqdbr 1 year ago
- kps 1 year agoNot because of the hue, but because the page doesn't respect `prefers-color-scheme`, which makes it hard to take any claim of ‘accessibility’ seriously.
Edit: nor `prefers-reduced-motion`, neither.
- ppbjj 1 year agoOh, come on. They're using Squarespace. Maybe complain about the state of WYSIWYG editors before dismissing someone's work.
- Brian_K_White 1 year agoIt doesn't matter what tools and facilities they used, they still designed and produced a web page. They are the ones who chose to use squarespace, and use that template, and be ok with the end result.
It's not like a pizza shop or a hairdresser who never claimed that their very reason for existing and mission and product was accessibility.
This is a completely topical and fair challenge.
- YurgenJurgensen 1 year agoWhy did they need a WYSIWYG editor to lay out static content in an entirely standard format? That could be done in Markdown, or plain html. These have the advantage of being trivial to handle with accessibility layers.
- Brian_K_White 1 year ago
- ppbjj 1 year ago
- geraldwhen 1 year agoThe fade in effect made me nauseous. I hate animation on webpages unless I’m seeking out gifs.
- andy99 1 year agoYeah I still can't tell if I'm just overanalyzing because it's supposed to be easy to read, but I found the webpage, especially the italicized bit, pretty jarring, even in contrast with my usual squinting at HN's tiny font on my phone.
- smeej 1 year agoI did too, and I've been sight-reading without thinking about it since preschool. I'm really unaccustomed to having to look hard at a word to see what it says, and that was the only way I could get through this page.
- smeej 1 year ago
- nottorp 1 year agoSame here. I can't evaluate the font because of the background.
Don't see why I should wait for images to fade in either.
- 1 year ago
- eadmund 1 year ago
- madeofpalk 1 year agoThis font looks radically different on my two monitors, being significantly worse on my 'standard' DPI monitor compared to my other high DPI monitor.
On my main, 1x monitor, the lowercase i has an anti-aliased "half pixel" at the bottom that extends past the baseline. A few other characters have this, but it's especially noticable on the lowcase i.
- csande17 1 year agoThe font could definitely use some technical tweaking for issues like that -- the kerning on "qu" also stands out as a problem.
It looks like this is the author's first attempt at making a font, though, and by that standard it's pretty good!
- porphyra 1 year agoYes that "qu" kerning is a problem indeed, glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that.
There are also some small technical typesetting issues in the samples, for example, by using straight quotes instead of true quotation marks in "Inclusive Feature 04".
But yes if it's her first attempt then it's quite good and I hope that with some tweaks and improvements, it will be a really good font!
- porphyra 1 year ago
- csande17 1 year ago
- microflash 1 year agoIt does look pleasant to me. But the x-height is not large enough which makes it harder to be legible on smaller text sizes. Also, lack of additional weights discourages me to use it on any webpage. I'd have given it a shot if a bold weight were also present.
Inter (with disambiguation features enabled) [1], Atkinson Hyperlegible [2], and IBM Plex Sans [3] are still better fonts to me.
- ClassyJacket 1 year ago>Clear distinction between I, l and 1
The problem with that is that in this font, the l (lower case L) is just a vertical line. It's true there is a distinction between the 3, but seeing the l on its own you can't tell which it is.
- cybervegan 1 year agoAny reason why "Pp" is missing from the typeface sampler?
- djxejms 1 year ago[flagged]
- djxejms 1 year ago
- RobotToaster 1 year agoAnother good font for this is OpenDyslexic https://opendyslexic.org/
- extra88 1 year agoNot really. In studies, OpenDyslexic and other "dyslexia fonts" with exaggerated shapes didn't perform better than commonly used conventional fonts.
- gnicholas 1 year agoI created a browser plugin that became pretty popular among readers with dyslexia, and we got a lot of requests for OD support. We added it and some people like it. My theory is that this relates partly to the increased kerning and the weight of the font (which makes a particularly big difference in combination with the color-based tech we use, since it makes the color more visible that way).
I have seen that some dyslexia fonts don't seem to have an advantage from a population level, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful for some people. Unless there's evidence that people who think it's useful are actually being misled by their perception, I'd say it's not a bad idea to let people know it exists.
- gnicholas 1 year ago
- extra88 1 year ago
- wizzwizz4 1 year agoObligatory: the most accessible font is usually a font your readers are already familiar with. This font looks distinctive, and personally I kinda like it, but it's not a magic wand you can wave over a document to make it more accessible.
- jraph 1 year agoYeah, on the web, just use font-family: sans-serif (or, now that browsers don't systematically default to a serif font anymore, just nothing at all) and let the user see the default font, or the font they picked. It also improves everything else in contrast with a web font: it saves bandwidth and therefore cost, it saves page load time and therefore SEO and user retention. And it's not worse, nay better, than the font you arbitrarily picked.
The default font needs to be dyslexic friendly on a dyslexic's computer if it's not already, and it should be the OS's job to ensure this.
I am afraid there's no one size fits all wrt fonts and accessibility because I suspect different conditions have different requirements, so you can't pick yourself as a web designer.
We indeed need dyslexic friendly fonts among others so dyslexic people can configure their devices with one that they like, fonts that are indeed actually proven as being effective as another commenter said. No proof: it didn't happen.
- flymasterv 1 year agoThis font is yet another case of accessibility advocates entirely missing the point of web accessibility.
- YurgenJurgensen 1 year agoBut letting the recipient’s browser decide means they wouldn’t be able to show everyone else how inclusive that are.
- madeofpalk 1 year agoIs it actually? Or is it a font designer, who doesn't know much about 'accessibility' give it a go?
- YurgenJurgensen 1 year ago
- flymasterv 1 year ago
- hot_gril 1 year agoWas going to ask, wouldn't something like Times New Roman be the most accessible just cause people are used to it? Plus, serifs make the letters more recognizable.
- extra88 1 year agoFamiliarity doesn't make Times New Roman's 'l' and '1' distinguishable.
I think sans serif fonts are preferred for most screen reading because it takes effort to perceive the tiny serif details, or just the really thin lines like the horizontal in the 'e', at typical font sizes.
But there are no absolutes so fonts that try to be more legible use some tails and such to make characters distinguishable.
- jraph 1 year agoSerifs makes it harder to read on screens, many people don't like them including dyslexic people.
With screens becoming more precise, it may be less of an issue, serifs and especially horrible on low definition screens, but it's not clear they improve things on higher definition screens.
- extra88 1 year ago
- jraph 1 year ago
- seydor 1 year agoIs there evidence that this is more legible? Because we don't read individual characters (but chunks) so making them individually distinguishable doesn't seem like it would have much of an effect.
- markhnthoraway 1 year agoIn the part where the claim is made that individual characters matter there's a footnote link that ultimately goes to this PDF thesis[1].
That thesis has a claim itself:
> Creating a well designed, legible typeface is therefore not about creating dissimilar characters; the aim must be to find, amongst other things, an optimal balance between uniformity and differentiation and, through that, to attain legibility
At the end of the related chapter, where the author surveys some studies about letter and word recognition. It seems like the distinctions made in this font may be informed by that kind of perspective - not that increased differentiation of characters is good on its own.
This is just at a glance but it seems there is at least a thread there to follow about evidence and reasoning.
- markhnthoraway 1 year ago
- Terr_ 1 year agoIt's probably the nostalgia talking, but I miss OCR-A.
- tomtomistaken 1 year agoOh wow, the text is so much easier for me to read! Thanks for sharing!
- MaximilianEmel 1 year agoThe `i' looks like an Inverted Exclamation Mark.
- jjjjoe 1 year agoWhere is the letter P in the second image?
- Fauntleroy 1 year agoThis typeface bears more than a passing resemblance to Circular, whose owner is known for litigating unauthorized usage. I'm concerned this will become a problem for Inclusive Sans or its users.
- wizzwizz4 1 year agoTypefaces are not protected by intellectual property law. Fonts, as computer software, are, but it should be easy to show that Inclusive Sans is a completely different program. I wouldn't worry about it, personally.
- wizzwizz4 1 year ago