Are you tired of staring at your screen, wondering, “Is that character a zero or an uppercase O? I think that’s a lowercase L, but it could be a one.” Or, perhaps traditional fonts make reading difficult for you. If you said yes to either of these, you may want to check out the Atkinson Hyperlegible font.
What’s Different About Atkinson Hyperlegible Font?
This font was developed by the Braille Institute to make reading easier for people with low vision. In a nutshell, the characters and spacing have been changed to make letters more easily distinguishable from each other. Here are a couple of examples of the difference between a typical font and Atkinson Hyperlegible:
These examples look pretty similar, so let me point out a couple of differences. Check out the lowercase y in both examples. With a typical font, the y is a straight diagonal line. Hyperlegible adds a small serif on the y, making it more recognizable. Take a look at the zero in both examples. The hyperlegible version leaves no doubt that we are looking at a zero and not an O.
Here is another comparison:
Pay particular attention to the difference in the g in both examples. Also, in the hyperlegible version, there is no serif at the top of the l in the catalog but one has been helpfully added to the bottom to distinguish it from an I or |.
It’s amazing how much easier the words are to read with these tiny changes!
How Can I Get This Font?
If you are a web designer and want to use this font on your sites, you can download it from Google Fonts. To install the font on your computer for use in creating documents, head to the Braille Institute website. Google Chrome also has an extension available that converts on-screen text to Atkinson Hyperlegible (not including fonts in images) at the click of a button. Please note that once you convert a website to Hyperlegible font using the extension, you will be unable to switch it back without uninstalling the extension.
