Abstract
Reading speed is dramatically reduced when readers cannot use their central vision. This is because low visual acuity and crowding negatively impact letter recognition in the periphery. In this study, we designed a new font (referred to as the Eido font) in order to reduce inter-letter similarity and consequently to increase peripheral letter recognition performance. We tested this font by running five experiments that compared the Eido font with the standard Courier font. Letter spacing and x-height were identical for the two monospaced fonts. Six normally-sighted subjects used exclusively their peripheral vision to run two aloud reading tasks (with eye movements), a letter recognition task (without eye movements), a word recognition task (without eye movements) and a lexical decision task. Results show that reading speed was not significantly different between the Eido and the Courier font when subjects had to read single sentences with a round simulated gaze-contingent central scotoma (10° diameter). In contrast, Eido significantly decreased perceptual errors in peripheral crowded letter recognition (-30% errors on average for letters briefly presented at 6° eccentricity) and in peripheral word recognition (-32% errors on average for words briefly presented at 6° eccentricity).
Highlights
ObjectivesOur goal was to break the similarity groups defined by Bouma [26]
"Facilitating and improving reading and writing leads to improved communication between people; [. . .] I believe that the one who would succeed in removing confusions, such as the on
Statistical analysis was performed using linear mixed effects modeling with random intercept and random slope to assess the effect of font type on the three reading parameters
Summary
Our goal was to break the similarity groups defined by Bouma [26]
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