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Designing and Evaluating Livefonts

Published: 20 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The emergence of personal computing devices offers both a challenge and opportunity for displaying text: small screens can be hard to read, but also support higher resolution. To fit content on a small screen, text must be small. This small text size can make computing devices unusable, in particular to low-vision users, whose vision is not correctable with glasses. Usability is also decreased for sighted users straining to read the small letters, especially without glasses at hand. We propose animated scripts called livefonts for displaying English with improved legibility for all users. Because paper does not support animation, traditional text is static. However, modern screens support animation, and livefonts capitalize on this capability. We evaluate our livefont variations' legibility through a controlled lab study with low-vision and sighted participants, and find our animated scripts to be legible across vision types at approximately half the size (area) of traditional letters, while previous smartfonts (static alternate scripts) did not show a significant legibility advantage for low-vision users. We evaluate the learnability of our livefont with low-vision and sighted participants, and find it to be comparably learnable to static smartfonts after two thousand practice sentences.

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  • (2021)Typeface effect in marketingAdvances in Psychological Science10.3724/SP.J.1042.2021.0036529:2(365)Online publication date: 2021
  • (2021)Interactive effects of institutional requirements and screen vs. Print platforms on preference of Times New Roman and Calibri among university studentsCogent Education10.1080/2331186X.2021.19687798:1Online publication date: 3-Sep-2021
  • (2021)Towards accessible news reading design in virtual reality for low visionMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-021-10899-9Online publication date: 16-May-2021
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '17: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
    October 2017
    870 pages
    ISBN:9781450349819
    DOI:10.1145/3126594
    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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    Published: 20 October 2017

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    Author Tags

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

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    UIST '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 73 of 324 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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    The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
    September 28 - October 1, 2025
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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2021)Typeface effect in marketingAdvances in Psychological Science10.3724/SP.J.1042.2021.0036529:2(365)Online publication date: 2021
    • (2021)Interactive effects of institutional requirements and screen vs. Print platforms on preference of Times New Roman and Calibri among university studentsCogent Education10.1080/2331186X.2021.19687798:1Online publication date: 3-Sep-2021
    • (2021)Towards accessible news reading design in virtual reality for low visionMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-021-10899-9Online publication date: 16-May-2021
    • (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.2019.05.003Online publication date: Nov-2019
    • (2018)Fonts Designed for Macular Degeneration: Impact on ReadingInvestigative Opthalmology & Visual Science10.1167/iovs.18-2433459:10(4182)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2018
    • (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

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