Typotheque: Zed font system for information accessibility.
www.typotheque.com
Zed is a lab-tested font designed for inclusivity and accessibility, empirically proven to significantly improve reading acuity for visually impaired readers
  • Soot [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    20 days ago

    Zed offers unprecedented design possibilities. Imagine a design with three dimensions – weight, width and skew – that allows you to select a style at any point along these axes. This allows you to work with 558 defined fonts, or any interval between them. Then imagine adding another dimension that enables you to round any letter or symbol as you wish. The possibilities multiply.

    So this “font” is actually a spectrum of like 1,000,000 fonts? Doesn’t that make it pretty meaningless to begin with?

    Zed Text was directly compared with – and outperformed – Helvetica in terms of speed of reading

    empirically proven to significantly improve reading acuity for visually impaired readers

    This “empirical proof” is extremely flawed and should not be used for claims like this. They tested one “kind” of Helvetica and five variations of Zed Text. 24 patients of two doctors over an unspecified time period (presumably a few hours?). At a set distance on one screen in a single environment. It only tested ‘immediate’ recognition. Wasn’t double or even single-blind. The test is only random strings, not recognisable words.

    They make no explanation as to how they came up with their ‘signficant difference’ bar other than that it only just fits the gap between Helvetica and the best performing variation of various Zed adjustments. The fact they failed to document and disclose their experimental and statistical methods leaves me to suspect incompetence / cherry picking / malicious p-hacking.

    If they sat down and said “maybe there’s an effect here? An actual study should be carried out”, then I’d perhaps agree.

    But the fact they make this very flawed experiment, fail to correctly document it, including even the most basic necessary statistics and then plaster what is bordering on medical factual claims all over their site makes me seriously distrust all the motives and statements here.