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

On Friday, Oct 17, 2003, at 14:25 Europe/Zurich, Joe Clark wrote:

> It would help to spell the name right.

Sorry, that's my fault.

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

In that case, why? (I can think of a dozen good reasons, but am 
interested in what actually struck you as one).

> 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.

Don't suppose you would care to expand on why? Both for this font and 
in general. The comments in the articles you mentioned give some clues, 
but would be a lot clearer with a few pictures, and a more methodical 
analysis would be nice. (Of course as someone with very little 
background in the area I would also be happy with a pointer to a 
standard work that an expert imagines everyone has read, or should have 
before they speak.)

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

This goes for most things really. On the other hand, people in the real 
world are often put in the position of having to find an answer now. 
Without pretending that an expose on a couple of fonts is a substitute 
for real knowledge, it would be interesting to at least see some of the 
issues that come up.

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Friday, 17 October 2003 08:49:53 UTC