Font affects reading performance of patients with AMD

COS 2012, July 4 - People with central vision loss can read text written in Courier font better than they can other commonly used fonts.

A study was done in which 24 patients with bilateral age-related macular degeneration (AMD) read text of varying sizes, using four versions of the MNRead reading charts. Patients had a mean visual acuity of 0.47 ± 0.19 LogMAR. The charts each had text written on them in Arial, Times New Roman, Courier, Lucinda Sans or Andale Mono fonts. Findings were presented at the COS conference by Luminita Tarita-Nistor, PhD, a fellow at the Toronto Western Research Institute.

Courier is a mono-spaced serif font (individual letters each take up the same amount of space), Arial is proportionally spaced (letters take up varying spaces depending on the size of the letter) and is sans serif; Times New Roman is a proportionally spaced, serif font; Lucinda Sans is mono spaced; and Andale Mono is sans serif, mono spaced.

The fonts that are sans serif and have variable spacing are commonly recommended by agencies that help visually impaired people, she said. Reading function was tested, and it was found patients could read significantly smaller print with the Courier chart (0.58 ± 0.21 logMAR) and performed more poorly with the Arial chart (0.69 ± 0.20 logMAR) than any other chart (p < 0.05).

More patients were able to read one or more sentences on the Courier chart than on any of the other charts. However, which font was used had no effect at larger print sizes: with bigger print-sized there was no difference in maximum reading speed among any of the four fonts.

She noted that the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) recommends Arial and concluded that recommendations should be revised.