Shohei Yamada and Xinru Zhu
July, 2017
Abstract
A line of evidence shows that 3–5% of the population in Japan have developmental dyslexia. Hence, providing them with assistive environment is essential. While it is supported by previous studies that typefaces have impacts on dyslexic readers, Japanese typefaces for dyslexic readers have not been created because (1) the characteristics of typefaces specially designed for dyslexic readers have not been clarified, (2) Japanese typefaces contain a large number of complicated characters which makes them more difficult to create, and (3) it is not easy to create a typeface that fits everyone with dyslexia due to the wide variation of symptoms. Against this backdrop, the present study aims to develop (i) Japanese typefaces for dyslexic readers and (ii) a typeface customization system for dyslexic readers. In this paper, we proposed the framework of the research and we conducted three studies which make up a part of the research. In Study 1, we extracted the characteristics of Latin typefaces for dyslexic readers by both objectively and subjectively comparing the elements of dyslexia typefaces to those of standard typefaces. In Study 2, we defined the desiderata for Japanese typefaces for dyslexic readers by mapping the characteristics extracted in Study 1 to Japanese typefaces. Previous research reporting the similarity of the character recognition process across the languages and the similar visual symptoms of dyslexia in English and Japanese provides basis for the mapping. In Study 3, we create two prototypes of Japanese typefaces for dyslexic readers—LiS Font walnut and LiS Font cashew—by applying the desiderata defined in Study 2 both programmatically and manually to an open source font Source Han Sans. We also propose methods for the preliminary evaluation of the prototypes based on previous studies.
