alt Hacker News> Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities
I'd love to know how that was determined. Given that:
"If different fonts are best for different people, you might imagine that the solution to the fonts problem would be a preference setting to allow each user to select the font that’s best for them.
This solution will not work, for two reasons. First, previous research on user-interface customization has found that most users don’t use preference settings, but simply make do with the default.
Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin...
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In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
That may be a case of "I hate reading this font so much I don't want to do more than skim over the text."
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> Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
What you actually want to compare speed in the most preferred font to, to show that individual choice is or is not better than one-size-fits-all dictate, is speed in the font that would be chosen as the universal choice by whichever mechanism would be used (to show it is universally better, show that there is no universal font choice that would lead to the average user being faster than with their preferred font.)
All comparing each individual's preferred font to each individual's fastest is showing that an individualized test-based optimized font choice is better for reading speed than individual preference font choice, which I guess is interesting if you are committed to individualized choices, but not if the entire question is whether individual or centralized choices are superior.