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obermd wrote: As with all Serif fonts, TNR simply doesn't scale to smaller screens. Or let us say, serif fonts don't scale to poor resolutions, whether on screen or poor resolution dot matrix printers.
Screens/printers of today have the resolution to handle serif fonts 'reasonably' well. Screens of 20 years ago did not. That was a good reason for favoring sans serif. I guess that is part of the reason why serif fonts went out of fashion. I came to prefer sans serif myself.
Arial fills out the kegel (is 'cone' the English typography term?) more than Calibri. Even though they are both called '11pt', the Calibri letter shapes are smaller, providing more air between the lines. I always found it hard to follow the lines in a packed page of 11 pt Arial set on 11pt line spacing, so in everything I wrote, I set line spacing to 1.2, or if you like, 11/13pt. With Calibri, I have changed my default to 1.1 line spacing, or 11/12pt. The smaller character size also goes sideways, so more text is packed to the line. I don't think taht reduces readability. I think that Calibri 11/12pt is easier to read than Arial 11/13pt.
(Edit typo in par.2: Serif fonts went out out fashion, not sans serif!)
modified 20-Jan-23 22:08pm.
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No, still Word. It’s just that the default font in Word has become Calibri (and that’s what they’re switching to)
TTFN - Kent
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Are there any independent studies at all suggesting that the typeface design is helping dyslectics overcome their problems?
I never heard about it before (although that does not mean it it not true!). What I certainly have heard, from several sources, is that kids who learn to read not by letters, but by entire word symbols (learning to break words down into individual letters long after they learn to read) have a much lower dyslexia frequency than those who learn to read by individual letters.
One of my friends learned to read that way. She was born and grew up in the US, and when I asked her to read out loud "English is tough stuff", without preparation, she did so without a glitch. It was as if she didn't see the point of the poem at all. I pointed out all those words rhyming, but spelled differently, or spelled similarly but not rhyming. 'But those are different words!' she said. Why did I expect them to rhyme?
Personal experience: I had a 'visually challenged' daughter, with some eyesight left but she preferred braille to the magnifying TV. When she started school, her teacher chose to introduce braille to the entire class. One of her classmates turned out to have a strong dyslexia ... when reading printed text. He very quickly learned to read braille with his fingertips, almost as well as my daughter. When reading with his fingertips he had no sign of dyslexia whatsoever.
So maybe switching to another typefaces is something like switching from visual reading to fingertip reading. But I sure would like to see an independent study showing it, before I trust the claim that it is so.
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kalberts wrote: One of her classmates turned out to have a strong dyslexia ... when reading printed text. He very quickly learned to read braille with his fingertips, almost as well as my daughter. When reading with his fingertips he had no sign of dyslexia whatsoever.
This argues that dyslexia is caused by a problem in the visual cortex rather than in whatever part of the brain processes words, and makes it more plausible that a change of font would help dyslexics.
Interesting.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Possibly, but my impression is that the scientists think dyslexia can have a great variety of causes.
My first thought here: If one of the causes is purely visual, call it 'optical', related to the photographic image your eye lens forms on your retina (so the typeface comes into play), then I would expect this to affect other images as well. The dyslectic would not as quickly pick up identifying details in other images or drawings, e.g. to identify the type of sailing ship or dog breed. It sounds improbable that the brain should have no problems visually identifying all other kinds of shapes and forms, but incapable of processing letter shapes properly. I consider it much more likely that it is related to the shapes being letters; they are expected to have 'letter semantics'. It still has to do with associating the letter image with letter semantics, but it would largely apply to any a-shape, b-shape or c-shape.
I am not completely rejecting that typeface may have an influence, but I would certainly like to see independent studies before making a conclusion. My guess is that e.g. serif/sans-serif can be essential, as well as how the dyslectic has learned to read - character by character, or word by word.
In my childhood, there was at least one pupil in each class plauged by stuttering. A fair share of people argued that this was caused by physical defects. However, their stuttering was cured through therapy, no operation. I haven't seen any kuid plagued by stuttering for many, many years. Appearently, we are no longer creating the mental conditions causing the mental blocks inhibiting their speech.
On the other hand: An incrasing number of kids raise similar blocks if you give them even a very simple math problem to solve: When seing numbers, they immediately block out all logical reasoning and strategic thinking, completely unable to know where to start to attack the problem. Dyscalculi is definitely on the rise - certainly here in Norway, but I think in some other countries as well.
I've seen very similar reactions when trying to teach kids elementary sheet music reading: Some kids panic immediately, cannot fixate on the sheet, if you ask them whether they think a sequence of notes go up or down in pitch, they have no idea ... What kind of dys-xxx is that? Dys-musicality? The majority of kids have no problems. Some of the kids terrified by sheet music can play or sing in perfect pitch, as long as there is not a music sheet in sight ...
Even hysteria (Wikipedia: Female hysteria[^]) wore off as the psychiological conditions for provoking it gradually faded away. Like with the stuttering. I am no saying that neither hysteria, stuttering nor dyslexia is 'self induced'. Some people obviously will trigger far more easily than others on certain conditions. Therapy must aim to reduce that hyper-sensitivity, to teach the patient to 'control the panic'. Psychology, mostly. Of course, in some cases you can reduce or remove the triggers, but that is the exceptional case. Finding a typeface that is more readable to some dyslectics (I strongly doubt that it will help all of them) is of use only for text specially prepared for dyslectics - hoping to make it the standard or only typeface on every web page on the internet, every printed newspaper or book ... We all know that it will never happen. I doubt that the typeface will be seen anywhere but in articles claiming that would be an improvement for dyslectics.
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I wonder how much that will cost taxpayers.
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Aligning with branding changes moving Microsoft Office to Microsoft 365, the program will now be known as the “Microsoft 365 Insider” program. Now it's so much better
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What's in a name? Not as much as you can put in two or more.
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As the dust settles from the news of massive layoffs over at Microsoft, details of who and what is getting cut are surfacing and parts of the HoloLens hardware team appear to be on the chopping block. Virtual Reality meets economic reality
OK, sorry. Augmented Reality...
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This new version includes highly requested new features, bug fixes, and massive performance improvements to the MVVM Toolkit source generators, to make the developer UX when using them better than ever! It takes a village to raise a toolkit
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It actually looks interesting.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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This release continues to bring new productivity improvements for all developers and enhances many of the capabilities that shipped in 17.5 Preview 2. Download it while it's still warm!
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I'd prefer to see the words "fixes" and "bugs"
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"This release continues to include zero fixes for any of the bugs that affect you."
Better?
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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The signals from WiFi can be used to map a human body, according to a new paper. It even works better than those X-Ray Spex I got in the mail
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Can they read between lines? .|||.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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ing s: We invented a new surveillance system using inexpensive hardware that is already present in almost every location with people. This improves privacy.
Can we revoke these idiots tenure and sack them on grounds of gross stupidity?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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C# 7.0 introduced the deconstruction syntax. It allows developers to extract in a single expression, properties of an object or elements of a tuple and then to assign them to distinct variables. Tear it all down!
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one feature to rule them all, one feature to find them, one feature to extract them all and in the assignment bind them
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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The companies say Apple is harming consumers and are asking the European Commission to act quickly, even before the EU’s transformative digital regulations come into effect. If you can't beat 'em, get a government to try
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They should be careful to not wake up "the beast", their business models and how they run them are not totally free of sins
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Microsoft has acknowledged a new bug affecting some Windows 11 applications triggering launch issues and causing them to display errors after a system restore. System Restore actually does something?
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Kent Sharkey wrote: System Restore actually does something? System Restore is actually being used?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Google AI released a research paper about Muse, a new Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers that can produce photos of a high quality comparable to those produced by rival models like the DALL-E 2 and Imagen at a rate that is far faster. Oh good, we were running a little short on those
Is it cancelled yet?
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