One major effect of the Paralympic games has been to shift public perception of what disability
looks like. For the longest time, design for people with disabilities have put aesthetic
considerations pretty low on the list. But there's been a clear shift in recent years
from accepting what is purely functional, to creating designs that are not just accessible,
but also attractive, modern, even inspiring.
Accessible design might still bring to mind wheelchair ramps and tactile signals at pedestrian
crossings and these improve quality of life for many. But increasingly, designers have
to think beyond the physical. Much of our lives take place on screen. It’s our ability
to communicate that makes us uniquely human. And what could be more fundamental to that
than the written word?
In this video I want to break down how a new font, Atkinson Hyperlegible, was designed
to improve accessibility for people with visio n impairment while maintaining its appeal and
and modernist style that can be appreciated by everyone. Now available on Google fonts
and in Google Docs. So, let's get started.
Full disclosure, I was very happy to have played a small part in the creation
of this font, which I'll get to later, but this is not a paid promotion. This font is
freely available for all, and even before I got involved I knew I wanted to talk about it.
Atkinson Hyperlegible was designed by the team at Applied Design Works for the Braille
Institute of America, as part of their broader rebranding project for the 100 year anniversary
of the organisation. It's named after the founder, J. Robert Atkinson - an entrepreneur
and former cowboy, who continued to ride a horse after losing his sight!
Although initially created to promote the Braille writing system, the institute now
works with all people living with vision impairments, only one in ten of which have a complete loss
of sight. Low vision covers a range of conditions, and these each posed different challenges
which shaped the eventual design.
From the start, this font set out to balance aesthetics and accessibility. The brief was
to make something appealing and usable to not only people with low vision but the broader
community of family, friends and healthcare professionals supporting those people.
By releasing the font for anyone to use for free, the hope is that it will benefit even
more people than the original intended audience.
At the core of the accessibility challenge is the problem of letter differentiation.
It's a beast of a problem too, because embedded at the core of traditional type design is
visual harmony. From the earliest Roman typefaces of the renaissance, the ideal design
has always been constructed of repeated forms. The regularity of shape is what we are used
to seeing and what we perceive as visually harmony in a font.
This sits in direct conflict with one of the main problems for people with low vision:
telling each letter apart without interrupting the flow of reading. The term for this is
letter differentiation. Having high differentiation creates improved recognition, which in turn
improves legibility. Meaning you can read faster, with less effort.
Now if aesthetics weren't a consideration, this would be an easy problem to solve! Just
grossly exaggerate the difference between characters. My wife, bless her, cannot tell
the difference between these two Canadian Ryans. Maybe you struggle too. But if we distort their features...
Completely different, equally hideous monsters!
You get the picture. What they didn't want to end up with is a font full of caricatures,
or some kind of ransom note. Instead the problem was approached through understanding the classic
principles of type design and deciding when, judiciously, to break them.
Atkinson Hyperlegible is styled after the modernist school of neo-grotesque san serifs.
The best known example of this genre is Helvetica. It was appropriate in character for the Braille
Institute who are headquartered in a historic and iconic piece of brutalist, modernist architecture.
However from a legibility perspective, the later-developed humanist sans serif genre
has several key features which improve readability. Frutiger is the quintessential humanist sans,
and being developed for the purpose of airport signage, was created with legibility very
much in mind. So level one of improving legibility was to take the principles learned from the
humanist school.
The height of the lowercase letters without ascenders or descenders is called the x-height,
and the larger the x-height as a proportion of the total vertical space, the more legible.
Apertures, or gaps that open an otherwise enclosed space in a letterform, are widened
to make them easier to distinguish, and the negative space inside enclosed letterforms
is enlarged.
The stroke ends or terminals, were also set at an open angle, rather than the straight
90 degree terminals in Helvetica, to visually enlarge the gap.
At level two we have the issue of homoglyphs - sets of characters which look similar or
the same. It's the type equivalent of homophones like red and read. A notorious example for
sans serif fonts: Uppercase I, lowercase l and the number 1. For people with blurred
vision, the lowercase i and the exclamation point can also be difficult to separate from
these characters. Atkinson distinguishes these by adding serifs to the uppercase I and a
tail to the lowercase l. On the lowercase i, the space between the dot (tittle) and
the main body was increased, and a left handed upper serif added.
In the case of the capital O and zero, a slash was added. Initially a forward slash, but
after feedback online, this was mirrored to avoid confusion with the Danish Ø.
Uppercase B and the number 8 also get into difficult territory. So the top half of the
8 was narrowed to create a more distinct, pear-shaped profile. Funnily enough, this
was the same solution used in 1968 for this typeface: OCR-A, or the ANSI Optical Character
Recognition standard alphabet. You might recognise it as a dated sci-fi cliche, but it was actually
developed so that early computers, with very low resolutions, would be able to distinguish
between characters by their rough profiles alone. Which shares similar design challenges
with those faced for Atkinson Hyperlegible.
Of course, computer vision and human vision are fundamentally different. Blurriness is
not the only issue to be accounted for. There are a range of vision impairments which can
come with ageing or as side effects of disease, including most commonly: macular degeneration,
where the centre of your field of vision degenerates, forcing you to rely on your much less acute
peripheral vision. Also diabetic retinopathy, which causes blotchy areas to be lost in your
field of sight. The more well known cataracts, are actually less common now that in the past,
as corrective surgery has proven so effective.
Taking this into consideration, character pairs which are not exactly homoglyphs still
need to be considered. How about uppercase Q and O? If the tail is too recessive, it
could easily be partially obscured for someone with diabetic retinopathy, so this was made
more prominent. Capital B and R, with imperfect vision at this bottom left corner,
Helvetica's B & R look very close, so a straight legged R is more legible. These are only some
of the many design details which have been included to improve legibility, bit by bit,
letter by letter.
Together with vision and rehabilitation specialists at the Braille Institute, multiple versions
of the typeface were tested and tweaked based on user feedback from candidates with low
vision conditions. Feedback was also taken from a public preview phase. Once the character
set was basically finalised, this is where I became involved.
My task was to take the letterforms that Elliott and Megan at Applied had designed, and make
them into a working set of fonts for all the formats needed for print and online. This
also meant determining the metrics of the font - that is, the space between letters,
as well as kerning, the specific tweaks in spacing between particular pairs of letters.
This is quite a time consuming task, and involves a lot of tuning to get a balanced result.
It's another area where aesthetics and legibility need to be balanced. While of course, spacing
letters further apart makes them easier to distinguish, that comes with a number of drawbacks
for everyday use. The spacing we ended up with has the benefit of making it easy
to substitute Atkinson Hyperlegible for Helvetica or Arial in a document, without worrying that
your page count and layout will be drastically changed.
Personally I'm really proud to have been involved with this project and am happy to see it reaching
even further through its inclusion in the Google Fonts library. If you want to give
it a try yourself, it's easy to do in Google Docs, just select the More Fonts option from
the font selection drop down, then search Atkinson.
If you try it for yourself or a loved one with vision impairment and you find it beneficial,
why not request your favourite app to include it as an option? There is no cost (even for commercial
use) and integration is even easier than ever thanks to Google fonts.
While this typeface was created to address the specific needs of people with low vision,
a lot of the design principles it incorporates may have benefits for people beyond that audience
too. Accessibility is not a design problem we solve once. It's an ongoing challenge,
and this is just one tool, one solution, which might not be the right fit for everyone and
every case.
None of the individual changes in Atkinson Hyperlegible are the first of their kind.
What hadn't been done before is using all these tools together, while balancing overall
harmony of the design. It's the hope of all the team involved, that this toolkit can be
picked up and used be other type designers in the future to create a much broader range
of accessible options in typography. After all, this is a beginning, not an end.
Thanks for watching, I hope you learned something new. Of course, links to the font will be
below, as well as a link to a talk from the team at Applied Design where they go into
much, much more detail on the project, which I couldn't cover here. My name is Linus,
I'll see you next time.