In a 2012 study, Zorzi and his co-authors found the effect of font to be small or nonexistent, and that the spacing between letters had a much larger and more reliable effect on readability for study participants. Others, like Marco Zorzi, a professor in the department of general psychology at the University of Padova in Padua, Italy, think it has more to do with the spacing between letters. In fact, some think the background or text color is more important. In other words, if a dyslexic reader is finding a serif-laden paragraph of Times New Roman looks like an impenetrable thicket of tiny lines and loops, then converting it into Comic Sans will probably help them decrypt it, if that's the font they've become habituated to reading and writing in.īut not everyone is convinced typography makes much of a difference for dyslexic readers. "However, we showed that well-known fonts are good for people with dyslexia, and those should be the ones to use." "We didn't include Comic Sans in our experiment, so I don't know if it's good for dyslexic readers," he says. Ricardo Baeza-Yates - who when he conducted the study was a vice president of research at Yahoo! Labs in Barcelona, Spain - the specific elements of a font might not help with readability so much as an individual being accustomed to that particular font. For instance, many report having trouble reading fonts that have those little lines at the end of each character called serifs, or fonts in which the letters that are mirror images of each other - p and q, b and d - look exactly the same when you invert them, or where the capital letter I, the lowercase l and the numeral 1 all look the same.īut scientific research into whether these special fonts actually work is pretty much nonexistent, although one 2013 study found familiar fonts like Arial, Verdana and Helvetica were often preferred by the study's dyslexic participants over dyslexic-friendly typefaces. So when a dyslexic reader scans a line of text, their brain might initially process a word like "modern" as "modem," or "tip" might become "pit."Ĭomic Sans isn't the only font dyslexic readers claim help them manage their disability some companies like Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic claim to make dyslexic-friendly fonts, created with specific input from dyslexic readers in mind. And in a recent piece in The Establishment, writer Lauren Hudgins argues that railing against Comic Sans is actually a privileged, ableist perspective that ignores the needs of those with dyslexia.ĭyslexia is a condition in which a person with an otherwise average or high IQ has a tough time reading and writing due to their brain's inability to interpret words and letters. When tasked with developing a new font for Microsoft, he figured the same principle would apply, and used the not-so-subtle lettering from classic comic books like "Batman" as inspiration for his now-infamous typeface.Īlthough Comic Sans might not establish an appropriate tone for everything you want to communicate - a court summons, or the poster for a death metal show, for instance - it is actually one of the few widely available fonts that some people with dyslexia say makes it easier to read and write. Originally designed in the early 1990s by Microsoft engineer Vincent Connare for the little pop-up information bubbles that appeared in early versions of Microsoft programs like Word, the font was the product of his years in art school, Connare told CNN's Great Big Story, where he developed the opinion that subtlety had no place in an art museum:
There are memes about all this - you can Google it.īut here's the thing about Comic Sans: You might hate everything it stands for, but it's actually exceptionally easy to read. They might call it infantile, cartoony, trite or tacky or even submit that Comic Sans is to fonts what Nickelback is to bands. In fact, there are whole organizations devoted to abolishing Comic Sans forever on the grounds that there's no place in this world for a typographical "voice" that sucks in this particular way (that they're largely unable to describe).
Seeing the typeface used in an inter-office email or on a T-shirt for a 5K race makes these people actually weak with a mixture of fury and melancholy. The font, popularized by your aunt and her friends and anybody who wants to give you explicit instructions about what you can and cannot throw into this particular toilet, is, in some people's opinion, an utter abomination. Oh wow, do some people ever hate Comic Sans. But is it also helpfully easy to read? Jupiterimages/Getty Images The cartoony font Comic Sans is often derided as immature.
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