The effect of font type on character legibility for different age groups

Abstract

The readability of 8 popular English fonts and 9 Chinese font types were studied in this study. The reaction time (RT/ms) and the legibility correctness (RC/%) were recorded in the experiment while the information transmission rate (ITR for short) were calculated from RT and RC. Two aged groups of subjects participated in the experiment, and it was found that the font recognition task performance of the youth group was better than that of the middle aged group. The legibility of sans serif English font was better than the serifs. However, the effect of sans serif fonts could not be found with the Chinese characters. At last, bold art font was the most difficult for reading and should be avoided for important information display interfaces. The results of our study could give some suggestions to the design of human machine interfaces.