For all their talk about how they think this will help kids read, I didn't see any evidence that they actually did any studies on whether or not this font has any affect at all.
There has been efficacy for people with dyslexia. Fonts like comic sans are closer to their own writing and therefore are easier to read.
You can also look at the Geronimo Stilton book series, a lot of words appear in different colors / fonts to emphasise words. These books are often easier for children and those with dyslexia to read.
Note: I still feel like calling it a typeface that makes reading easier is inappropriate. No study has specifically been conducted on this typeface, and drawing conclusions from (limited, and arguably unrelated) studies and and anecdotes is dubious at best.
There's certainly a large amount of anecdotal evidence that a decent percentage of dyslexic people benefit from using Comic Sans. I don't know if there has ever been a formal study though.
There's also a view that all dyslexia doesn't have a single cause. If that is true, then there may be different things that are helpful depending on the exact cause.
I remember reading somewhere that reading a text with an unfamiliar font face you spend more time reading it, so you're using more cognitive load and are more likely to understand the text. Which might suggest it is just the novelty impacting the reading and not the font face itself.
That heavily depends on your definition of "positive impact". In design/typesetting theory there are different "kinds of reading" and some fonts have positive effects, as in "works well with that kind of reading", while others are not very well suited for a specific task.
For example letters with very distinct shapes and different heights between lower and uppercase letters, like often found in serif fonts, are generally said to be easier to process for your eyes and brain.
Your brain learns to "read without reading" by scanning for known shapes and groups of shapes and just recognizing letters and words by that. You start to skip words, letters, whatever, once your brain has internalized that font.
That effect helps with reading faster and with less "stress" which is ideal for longer texts like in a book. Combine that with a good mixture of line length, font size and line height and you can create long texts that can be read very well.
Now take the same font, set it really tiny because you're working on an Encyclopaedia and don't want it to have 300 pages more and those font features that helped you before, actually make it more difficult to read.
Fine shapes might break away in the printing process or run up and your text will be harder to read. A sans-serif font might be better suited here. Straight crisp lines, that can be reproduced very well might actually make a better job here.
So... Fonts can have a positive impact on reading, depending on your definition of impact. ;-)
Maybe it's easy for kids to read, but I found the font too bold and the letters too close-together to read comfortably. I gave up before I could read all their justifications for those decisions.
But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for me.
The CSS has
{ letter-spacing: -.04rem; }
It's across the entire site - no exclusion for this page (or for their .kermit-font class). So it appears they've missed the fact that they're altering the look-and-feel of the very font they're presenting in this post.
I assume that's to work around the high width of the font. Information density seems too low for paragraphs of text with that width.
I could see this current version (without the spacing hack) being the "easy-reader" version, and then make a "YA reader" variant that's lower weight and horizontallu narrower.
I feel like the lowercase lacks risers, it's kerned too tightly to be legible quickly. It's ornamental but I don't feel easier, it's more difficult to read if anything.
It feels fatiguing to read; and I'm supposedly in one of their target demographics.
Personally I've always found Monospace fonts the easiest like Microsoft's Courier New or Consolas. It feels like you're time travelling back to the 1980s visually, but they're so comfortable to read because your brain can make assumptions which are accurate.
This is anecdotal and I hope someone who has some research experience can say whether this is true or not generally, but I recently got a Kindle and found that if I use really large font sizes where there are fewer than 50 words on a page it's easier for me to stay engaged. Maybe this has something to do with cognitive load or chunking information. Some fonts look quite a bit better at these large sizes. So for me I don't think typography alone is sufficient. I think the interaction between a large font size and a typography that looks pleasing at a large font size helps with engagement.
I knew someone who would with an opaque ruler with a hole on one end. They would read the words through the hole and I guess it helped them stay focused on just the word or two they were reading. It sounds somewhat similar to what you are describing.
At the same time, don't all fonts, typographically, look better larger?
I don't know what the DPI of the Kindle display is. But since you called it out specifically, perhaps the issue you are having is more specific to that device. Contrast with how you perceive reading on a high-DPI laptop display perhaps.
The normal standard for line length is 2--3 alphabets worth of text.
I find that shorter ones break up and slow down my reading, while too-long lines make reading wearisome to the point where I actually bought the Kindle version of:
Trying to find out how this font is licenced is painfully impossible on both the linked Microsoft website and the atrocious https://kermit-font.com/ homepage.
Regardless of the claimed merits of this font (I'm not dyslectic and this font just strains my eyes), I hold the opinion that any effort like this by a megacorp like Microsoft should be approached by them from a charitable angle. If this font isn't permissively licenced (I.e., Microsoft bought it and liberated it from creator Underware) and is just an Office exclusive, it is pointless, and possibly harmless (like that font which OpenDyslexic is based on).
"The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38 styles arriving in early May."
+1 The first thing I did was search for the license. The license is what can make it or break it in this kind of project. The absence of clear and permissive licensing is a red flag for me.
Another consideration which I'm surprised wasn't made use of is that letter recognition is overwhelmingly focused on the upper half of letters --- ages ago, there was a typeface developed which took advantage of that, providing variants of letters where the lower halves were modified so as to indicate how a particular letter used in a particular word was pronounced, so that the "c" in "cat" had a different lower portion from the "c" in "cent".
That said, I'd really like it if they would publish the software used to make this font, ideally as opensource --- I have a type design project which stalled against the need to create variants for each size, working from an incompleat set of letterforms at each size (the only letters available in the compleat size range from the sample I had were "n" and "N", go figure) --- I believe this would let me finish up all the sizes of the design.
As the 'pedia page says, the main issue was transfer to mainstream letters. I came through infant school a year or two after this idea was abandoned in the UK. We did have the colour coded reading books mentioned though.
I suspect that it was a personal project of some teacher at some school I was attending, or maybe it's something which I came across while studying typography which was never actually implemented.
Anyway, I think it's an idea which someone should give a try --- maybe I will some day in a future font design.
I really like this. Just some anecdata from someone without a reading disability but who doesn’t love reading, I feel like does make reading easier for me. Maybe it’s just because I like the way it looks more than most fonts, I’m not sure, but I’m happy this exists and research is being done in this area. I’ll be trying this out in my email client and other applications if the fonts are available for download.
It's a nice looking font but kind of hilarious that the official website [0] is entirely baffling! What do those icons mean? What is the license? And mainly: how the f can I GET the damn thing???
Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...
> The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38 styles arriving in early May.
Beta version of a custom font for Microsoft by Underware. Only for internal testing, not meant for any other kind of usage. Email info@underware.nl for more information
Seems to be a rushed release that they had a deadline to get to put a press release for.
The typefaces we commonly see in print and advertising are among the greatest artistic achievements our species has produced.
Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives. Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar role in our culture.
In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.
Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears exceptionally sloppy as a result.
I thought the font was overall very pleasant easy to read… except for every variation of it beyond the standard weight. Every thin, bold, and italicized version of it I thought was actually quite difficult to read.
> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.
As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).
In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.
But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.
As a former teacher who's done original research in educational psychology, I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was motivated by, 'When I was a teacher, I saw ______ and that made me sad.' Any 'theory' is a just-so story that the researcher assembled from ideas they found aesthetically pleasing. It's not science; it's activity without achievement, because the individual pieces of research can't be assembled into a coherent body of knowledge.
School administrators sometimes implement the stupidest policies based on correlations of various strengths. But even a strong correlation might have nothing to do with causation.
E.g.: A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes.
Depending on what “algebra” as an entire class actually is (I don’t know of it in that form from my Australian upbringing or from elsewhere) I can see it possibly having real benefit: abstract reasoning is one of the major things that needs to be taught to kids and has huge benefits but too often isn’t particularly taught; and algebra with all its symbolic representations and logical reasoning is excellent for that.
From your single-paragraph anecdote I don’t know the full story, of course, but it’s plausible to me that it might be not solely a case of confusing correlation and causation, but at least partly because the described effect made sense to people making the decisions, based on their broad experience in education.
The point is that they're teaching algebra without ensuring that the students are proficient in the prerequisites, so those students who are behind are not actually learning anything. You might as well teach it in first grade for all the good it's doing.
> I'd like to add that educational psychology is just a grab-bag of weak correlations whose discovery was [un]motivated
That's not just educational psychology. All of child psychology and child development is like that. People still talk as if Piaget might have been on to something.
Note that while the article doesn't really provide anything convincing, there is good reason to believe that indicating prosody makes it easier for children to understand written text.
The argument is just that, despite the writing system making absolutely no provision for any indication of prosody, native speakers keep spontaneously adding such indications to their writing. Look at this sidethread comment:
> A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody]
> Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody, and since that wasn't enough here, capitalization does too]
Or here's the New York Times in 1993:
> I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. "Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?" [question marks show prosody]
Actually, I should point out that commas show prosody and are often covered as doing so in formal instruction, though formal instruction is at least as likely to take the viewpoint that commas occur for no particular reason and you just have to memorize when it is or isn't appropriate to use them.
I did some more thinking on this. Font technology like this could be useful for a better stylo + touch-screen interface where the handwriting is translated to real characters while still having the same visual quality of the handwriting. You'll need lots more styles though, and very complicated user interaction in the background.
As a dyslexic font nerd, I have a question for you. Does Comic Sans actually help? Lots of people claim it's the easiest for dyslexics to read. I'm not dyslexic, but I set all my chat windows to Comic Sans because I've found that it helps me read it.
Dunno, at least not for me. But is it not dubious that literally the one font that everyone has been conditioned to dislike through the power of memes is then magically the one that then must be helpful for dyslexics? Like why not any one of the other terrible fonts that shipped with Windows XP like Papyrus. Feels like magical thinking to me.
Even designing a study to find the "right" font for dyslexics would sit strange with me. I remember not liking to read certain text because of the way they where printed, but this had more to do with me being unfamiliar with the typeset and not necessary its inherent qualities. These days it is much easier for me to pick up new skills because I know so much already, but for someone with a learning disability it is hard to acquire more then one skill at a time. So my advice, pick one font and stick to it.
Actually maybe this is bad advice. Perhaps focus specifically on learning to read many different fonts. I found my education to be very paternalistic and intellectually unstimulating. It is hard having an asymmetric IQ, with the verbal IQ of an average person, combined with the spatial intelligence of a genius and the motor skills of a moron.
I think you can say about dyslexics what I've heard said about autism, that it is not a spectrum but a constellation of different neurological phenomena that are hard to classify on a single axis. Is Pluto a planet with a moon that is bigger than itself or just some random trans Neptunian object we like to obsess about.
When Windows forces me to sign in to install it, I can't help but feel it's subsidizing this entire design silo. In the next episode, now lets make everyone (including dyslexic people) jump through even more hoops to install Windows to subsidize the creation of a font that even if it did help dyslexic people that I would not be able to use since it was at the expense of everyone else. YMMV.
180 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadDevs: "It's because of your--"
Boss: "Other sites do it. Get on it."
You can also look at the Geronimo Stilton book series, a lot of words appear in different colors / fonts to emphasise words. These books are often easier for children and those with dyslexia to read.
Note: I still feel like calling it a typeface that makes reading easier is inappropriate. No study has specifically been conducted on this typeface, and drawing conclusions from (limited, and arguably unrelated) studies and and anecdotes is dubious at best.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDyslexic
Looks like a terrible font.
There's also a view that all dyslexia doesn't have a single cause. If that is true, then there may be different things that are helpful depending on the exact cause.
Kermit seems like an impressively shoddy imitation in my opinion.
Kermit Sans is like an artist's imagining of Cthulhu gleaned from the rantings of a person driven insane from glimpsing its Eldrich form.
For example letters with very distinct shapes and different heights between lower and uppercase letters, like often found in serif fonts, are generally said to be easier to process for your eyes and brain.
Your brain learns to "read without reading" by scanning for known shapes and groups of shapes and just recognizing letters and words by that. You start to skip words, letters, whatever, once your brain has internalized that font.
That effect helps with reading faster and with less "stress" which is ideal for longer texts like in a book. Combine that with a good mixture of line length, font size and line height and you can create long texts that can be read very well.
Now take the same font, set it really tiny because you're working on an Encyclopaedia and don't want it to have 300 pages more and those font features that helped you before, actually make it more difficult to read.
Fine shapes might break away in the printing process or run up and your text will be harder to read. A sans-serif font might be better suited here. Straight crisp lines, that can be reproduced very well might actually make a better job here.
So... Fonts can have a positive impact on reading, depending on your definition of impact. ;-)
But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for me.
It definitely seems too thick to me.
The CSS has { letter-spacing: -.04rem; } It's across the entire site - no exclusion for this page (or for their .kermit-font class). So it appears they've missed the fact that they're altering the look-and-feel of the very font they're presenting in this post.
I could see this current version (without the spacing hack) being the "easy-reader" version, and then make a "YA reader" variant that's lower weight and horizontallu narrower.
Obviously some placebo effect from the context but it felt fun.
My initial impression was I can't read it fast, and when I try to read it fast then I miss words and have to go back.
If anything, it forces you to slow down. Maybe that's good for people who are learning to read. But for experienced readers, that seems bad.
On the plus side, the feeling of reading this is nice. It is easy on the eyes.
This might be a good fit for educational material. But I would not use this for journalism or literature.
Personally I've always found Monospace fonts the easiest like Microsoft's Courier New or Consolas. It feels like you're time travelling back to the 1980s visually, but they're so comfortable to read because your brain can make assumptions which are accurate.
I don't know what the DPI of the Kindle display is. But since you called it out specifically, perhaps the issue you are having is more specific to that device. Contrast with how you perceive reading on a high-DPI laptop display perhaps.
I find that shorter ones break up and slow down my reading, while too-long lines make reading wearisome to the point where I actually bought the Kindle version of:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37858510-the-inklings-an...
to read rather than the print edition.
Regardless of the claimed merits of this font (I'm not dyslectic and this font just strains my eyes), I hold the opinion that any effort like this by a megacorp like Microsoft should be approached by them from a charitable angle. If this font isn't permissively licenced (I.e., Microsoft bought it and liberated it from creator Underware) and is just an Office exclusive, it is pointless, and possibly harmless (like that font which OpenDyslexic is based on).
"The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38 styles arriving in early May."
It's listed here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-fonts-in-of...
I didn't find an actual license. The typography faq presumably applies to the cloud fonts: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq
https://tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19/euler-summary.pdf
Another consideration which I'm surprised wasn't made use of is that letter recognition is overwhelmingly focused on the upper half of letters --- ages ago, there was a typeface developed which took advantage of that, providing variants of letters where the lower halves were modified so as to indicate how a particular letter used in a particular word was pronounced, so that the "c" in "cat" had a different lower portion from the "c" in "cent".
That said, I'd really like it if they would publish the software used to make this font, ideally as opensource --- I have a type design project which stalled against the need to create variants for each size, working from an incompleat set of letterforms at each size (the only letters available in the compleat size range from the sample I had were "n" and "N", go figure) --- I believe this would let me finish up all the sizes of the design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
As the 'pedia page says, the main issue was transfer to mainstream letters. I came through infant school a year or two after this idea was abandoned in the UK. We did have the colour coded reading books mentioned though.
I suspect that it was a personal project of some teacher at some school I was attending, or maybe it's something which I came across while studying typography which was never actually implemented.
Anyway, I think it's an idea which someone should give a try --- maybe I will some day in a future font design.
Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...
[0] https://kermit-font.com/
> The basic styles of Kermit (Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic) are available today in Office, with the remaining 38 styles arriving in early May.
...from the last paragraph of the linked article.
Beta version of a custom font for Microsoft by Underware. Only for internal testing, not meant for any other kind of usage. Email info@underware.nl for more information
Seems to be a rushed release that they had a deadline to get to put a press release for.
Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives. Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar role in our culture.
In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.
Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears exceptionally sloppy as a result.
Kermit will not survive.
As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).
In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.
But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.
The typeface looks nice though.
E.g.: A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes.
From your single-paragraph anecdote I don’t know the full story, of course, but it’s plausible to me that it might be not solely a case of confusing correlation and causation, but at least partly because the described effect made sense to people making the decisions, based on their broad experience in education.
That's not just educational psychology. All of child psychology and child development is like that. People still talk as if Piaget might have been on to something.
Note that while the article doesn't really provide anything convincing, there is good reason to believe that indicating prosody makes it easier for children to understand written text.
The argument is just that, despite the writing system making absolutely no provision for any indication of prosody, native speakers keep spontaneously adding such indications to their writing. Look at this sidethread comment:
> A school my wife used to work at is requiring all 8th graders to take algebra (normally a high-school-level class in the US) regardless of math aptitude because some study shows that 8th graders who take algebra have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody]
> Nevermind the fact that this is almost certainly because kids who are already good at math will both take algebra AND have improved outcomes. [italics show prosody, and since that wasn't enough here, capitalization does too]
Or here's the New York Times in 1993:
> I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. "Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?" [question marks show prosody]
( https://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/15/magazine/on-language-like... )
If it's important enough that everyone feels the need to write it down even though they aren't supposed to, it's probably important to children too.
Curious if the claims have truth to them.
Even designing a study to find the "right" font for dyslexics would sit strange with me. I remember not liking to read certain text because of the way they where printed, but this had more to do with me being unfamiliar with the typeset and not necessary its inherent qualities. These days it is much easier for me to pick up new skills because I know so much already, but for someone with a learning disability it is hard to acquire more then one skill at a time. So my advice, pick one font and stick to it.
Actually maybe this is bad advice. Perhaps focus specifically on learning to read many different fonts. I found my education to be very paternalistic and intellectually unstimulating. It is hard having an asymmetric IQ, with the verbal IQ of an average person, combined with the spatial intelligence of a genius and the motor skills of a moron.
I think you can say about dyslexics what I've heard said about autism, that it is not a spectrum but a constellation of different neurological phenomena that are hard to classify on a single axis. Is Pluto a planet with a moon that is bigger than itself or just some random trans Neptunian object we like to obsess about.