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Reading and Learning Smartfonts

Published: 16 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

As small displays on devices like smartwatches become increasingly common, many people have difficulty reading the text on these displays. Vision conditions like presbyopia that result in blurry near vision make reading small text particularly hard. We design multiple different scripts for displaying English text, legible at small sizes even when blurry, for small screens such as smartphones and smartwatches. These "smartfonts" redesign visual character presentations to improve the reading experience. Like cursive, Grade 1 Braille, and ordinary fonts, they preserve orthography and spelling. They have the potential to enable people to read more text comfortably on small screens, e.g., without reading glasses. To simulate presbyopia, we blur images and evaluate their legibility using paid crowdsourcing. We also evaluate the difficulty of learning to read smartfonts and observe a learnability/legibility trade-off. Our most learnable smartfont can be read at roughly half the speed of Latin after two thousand practice sentences. It is also legible smaller than half the size of traditional Latin (i.e. "English") when blurry.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)AdaptiFont: Increasing Individuals’ Reading Speed with a Generative Font Model and Bayesian OptimizationProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445140(1-11)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2019)G-Sparks: Glanceable Sparklines on SmartwatchesProceedings of the 45th Graphics Interface Conference10.20380/GI2019.23(1-9)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
  • (2019)Readability and legibility of fonts considering shakiness of head mounted displaysProceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers10.1145/3341163.3347748(150-159)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2019
  • Show More Cited By

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '16: Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
    October 2016
    908 pages
    ISBN:9781450341899
    DOI:10.1145/2984511
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 16 October 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. accessibility
    2. fonts
    3. learning
    4. low-vision
    5. reading
    6. scripts

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    UIST '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 79 of 384 submissions, 21%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2021)AdaptiFont: Increasing Individuals’ Reading Speed with a Generative Font Model and Bayesian OptimizationProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445140(1-11)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2019)G-Sparks: Glanceable Sparklines on SmartwatchesProceedings of the 45th Graphics Interface Conference10.20380/GI2019.23(1-9)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Readability and legibility of fonts considering shakiness of head mounted displaysProceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers10.1145/3341163.3347748(150-159)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2019
    • (2019)Typeface features and legibility researchVision Research10.1016/j.visres.2019.05.003165(162-172)Online publication date: Dec-2019
    • (2018)Designing an Animated Character System for American Sign LanguageProceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3234695.3236338(282-294)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2018
    • (2017)Designing and Evaluating LivefontsProceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3126594.3126660(481-492)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2017

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