Arab children's reading preference for different online fonts

Abstract

E-learning education plays an important role in the educational process in the Arab region. There is more demand to provide Arab students with electronic resources for knowledge now than before. The readability of such electronic resources needs to be taken into consideration. Following design guidelines in the e-learning programs' design process improves both the reading performance and satisfaction. However, English script design guidelines cannot be directly applied to Arabic script mainly because of difference in the letters occupation and writing direction. Thus, this paper aimed to build a set of design guidelines for Arabic e-learning programs designed for seven-to-nine years old children. An electronic story is designed to achieve this goal. It is used to gather children's reading preferences, for example, font type/size combination, screen line length, and tutoring sound characters. Results indicated that Arab students preferred the use of Simplified Arabic with 14-point font size to ease and speed the reading process. Further, 2/3 screen line length helped children in reading faster. Finally, most of children preferred to listen to a female adult tutoring sound. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.