Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces?

Subject: Usability: Serif and Sans-Serif font faces?
From: Karel van der Waarde <waarde -at- glo -dot- be>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 10:04:14 +0200


Dear all,

A research article about the following question:

I suppose that having learned the letters sans-serif,
the kids are in a position better to understand what
makes an A an A and a Q a Q without being distracted
by the peculiarities of any particular typeface

was recently published in:


Information Design Journal 2003, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 106-122(17)

"Serifs, sans serifs and infant characters in children's reading books"
(Sue Walker, Linda Reynolds)

Abstract:
This paper describes part of the work of the Typographic Design for Children project at The University of Reading. The aim was to find out whether children found serif or sans serif types easier or more difficult to read, and whether they found text with infant characters (e.g. variants of 'a' and 'g') easier or more difficult to read. We listened to 6-year-old children reading in a classroom, using specially designed, high quality test material set in Gill Sans and Century with and without infant characters. We also asked children for their views about the typefaces used. We used miscue analysis to study tapes of children's reading to see whether more errors occurred in text set in a particular typeface. The substitution category of miscue was explored in more depth to see whether differences were attributable to typeface. The results show that children in our test group could read text set in Gill and Century equally well.

Keywords: typography [for children]; typefaces [for children]; infant characters; serif and sans serif types; children's reading


Some test material can be seen at:
http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_articles.cgi?bookid=IDJ%2011%3A2%2F3&artid=41048041


The article can be obtained from (Be careful: very long url):
http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/ExpandTOC/ingenta;jsessionid=mt59b4b9dk3q.circus?issue=pubinfobike://jbp/idj/2003/00000011/00000003&index=3

Kind regards,
Karel.
waarde -at- glo -dot- be

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