Authors:
Efecan Serin, Aprigio Luis Moreira Morgado, Ricardo Santos
Institutions:
Instituto Politecnico de Leiria (Portugal), Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal)
Summary:
While designing something, you may have been urged to make sure that the font you use is “readable”. But something that may be readable for a majority of the population may not be truly accessible to everyone. In this paper, researchers investigated how typography can be used to improve educational practices for autistic students.
Reading is a complex skill, and even reading a simple sentence requires a set of skills that can distinguish each word from the concept of the intended meaning of a text.
Researchers first investigated pre-existing literature on the reading habits of autistic students. They found that there was contradictory evidence on how autism affects reading comprehension abilities and noted that reading comprehension ability depended a lot on factors such as IQ, age, and symptoms.
Thus, in order to create a typeface to assist in reading comprehension, the researchers sent out a survey to organizations that support teachers of autistic students. This survey was sent out to English, Turkish, and German-speaking organizations (unfortunately, there were only 2 people who responded from the German-speaking organizations, so the study chose to focus on the results from the English and Turkish-speaking organizations). Through this survey, they discovered some barriers that were fairly common across the different organizations:
In terms of mixing up similarly shaped words, the researchers also compiled a table of similarly shaped letter pairs and letter groups for both English and Turkish.
Table 17 (p.84) English Letter Groups
Table 18 (p. 84) Turkish Letter Groups
Table 15 (p. 83) English Letter Pairs
Table 16 (p. 83) Turkish Letter Pairs