RE: specialised fonts Re: read regular - typeface for dyslexics

> Is this font available anywhere?

When you say "available," you evidently meant "Can I freely download this
expensive intellectual property because I don't feel like paying for it?"

> I have checked the RNIB's site (they are
> using Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) and a 10 minute Goggle does not
> turn it up anywhere...

It would help to spell the name right.

1. A member of the Tiresias family is included on the CD-ROM with my book,
despite my massive reservations about the font.

2. You can buy it, if you must. Tiresias Screenfont is the most expensive.
<http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/tiresias/>

3. *All* the fonts allegedly designed to allegedly alleviate a disability
have been outright failures (sole exception: Ancient BBC subtitling font--
and I mean *subtitling*, not *captioning*-- by the University of Reading).
The designers don't know what they're doing and have no knowledge
whatsoever of either the history of typography, which people like John
Gill tend to dismiss as a kind of disposable prettification, or the actual
psychology of reading. This alleged dyslexia font is a flat-out disaster.
My designer friend's eight-year-old could have done a better job.

> It would seem to me that this would/should be a valuable resource to our
> community.

Yeah, if they actually worked, and if the *users* of such fonts had any
typographic knowledge or training. Since most of them are Windows users,
the chance of that is nil.

See, inter alia,

<http://joeclark.org/design/print/readingthetube.html>
<http://typographi.ca/000715.php>

Remember, the fact that your computer has a Font menu and that you can
read have no bearing whatsoever on your own capacity to use type
effectively. You are much more likely to do harm and make mistakes than
anything else The same goes double if you think you can just whip up a
font that "solves" some kind of accessibility "problem."

You can remedy this problem by beginning to learn about typography. You'll
be production-ready approximately ten years later.

--

  Joe Clark  |  joeclark@joeclark.org
  Author, _Building Accessible Websites_
  <http://joeclark.org/access/> | <http://joeclark.org/book/>

Received on Friday, 17 October 2003 08:25:21 UTC