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How Type Influences Readability – Fonts Knowledge - Google Fonts
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- Scholars researching how people read can have expertise in a broad range of areas such as psychology, linguistics, semiotics, literary critics, vision sciences, and anthropology
- Reading is what we do, while readability refers to qualities of a text that make reading easier. This includes content decisions, or format decisions, which help a reader to easily engage with and comprehend the message intended by the author. Poor readability can obscure, change, or convince the reader never even engage with the author’s message.
- There are physiological mechanisms that determine how well a person can see text. Understanding written text is a very complex process that originates in the eye with the interplay of two types of light sensing cells, cones and rods, and continue in the brain where the basic visual information from text is decoded by a series of sequential processing mechanisms of increasing complexity that feed into the language processing areas of the brain.
- Legibility is being able to clearly see the structure of the text. Legibility is achieved when the text is not fuzzy or blurred and the reader can see all the details without any visual stress such as squinting or rereading.
- For children, learning to read normally starts with becoming aware of how words sound, known as phonological processing. This awareness is coupled with matching sounds and letters. A beginner English reader learns the connections between the 26 letters of the alphabet and the approximately 44 sounds of spoken English (the phonemes). Learners actively explore different ways of reading as they become expert readers. Successful readers build the ability to recognize most words automatically and read fluently, by paying attention to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.