Understanding the Assessment Methods for Readability and Legibility in Typography: A Systematic Review

Author: Nisha Arya, Shilpi Saraswat and Sudhanand Prasad Lal

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Abstract

Typography is more than just visual aesthetics; it fundamentally shapes how information is perceived and understood. This systematic review aims to evaluate and synthesize current methodologies for assessing readability and legibility in typography. A comprehensive literature search across six databases, including Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed, was conducted from February 2023 to April 2023, focusing on studies published between 2015 and 2023. A total of 197 records were identified, and screened according to PRISMA guidelines, and 49 studies were included for analysis. The review critically evaluated traditional readability formulas, eye-tracking studies, reading speed and accuracy assessments, and qualitative surveys, highlighting their application contexts, strengths, and limitations. Key findings revealed that readability formulas, while effective for text difficulty assessment, often fail to capture the complexity of modern digital typography. Eye-tracking provided in-depth insights into reading behaviours, emphasizing the impact of typographic elements on user interaction. Reading speed and accuracy metrics emerged as crucial indicators of text usability, while subjective assessments through ratings and surveys offered valuable user perspectives often overlooked by quantitative methods. This review underscores the need for integrated assessment approaches combining both objective metrics and subjective feedback to enhance typographic design. This research may encourage efforts to optimize typography for diverse audiences, enhancing readability, legibility, and overall user experience across platforms

Keywords

Assessment Methods, Legibility, Readability, Typography and Systematic Review

Conclusion

The field of readability and legibility assessment is evolving, with different methods offering unique benefits and drawbacks. Traditional readability formulas, like the Flesch Reading Ease, Gunning Fog Index, and SMOG index, provide quick, quantitative measures by evaluating text based on factors such as sentence length and word difficulty. While these tools are convenient for assessing text complexity, they often miss the traces of modern typography and the elements that engage readers. Eye-tracking studies have brought a new level of understanding to the field by examining how people interact with text. By measuring metrics like fixation duration and eye movement patterns, these studies reveal how different typographic designs affect reading speed and comprehension, offering valuable insights for optimizing text layout across both digital and print platforms. Similarly, metrics like reading speed and accuracy are crucial for gauging how well readers process information, which is especially important when designing educational materials and public health messages. However, these measures alone may not fully capture the overall reading experience. To fill this gap, surveys and rating scales provide a more personal perspective, gathering feedback on how readable and legible people find different texts. These methods help identify user preferences and areas where text design can be improved. Moving forward, there is a need to combine traditional readability tools with advanced technologies like eye-tracking and biometrics for a more comprehensive approach. Research should also explore the effects of new digital and virtual reality platforms on text design and consider diverse linguistic and cultural contexts to make findings more globally relevant. By integrating both subjective feedback and objective metrics, we can better understand how text design impacts reader engagement and comprehension, ultimately leading to more effective and user-friendly texts

References

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How to cite this article

Nisha Arya, Shilpi Saraswat and Sudhanand Prasad Lal (2023). Understanding the Assessment Methods for Readability and Legibility in Typography: A Systematic Review. Biological Forum – An International Journal, 15(6): 919-926