Adaptifont: Increasing individuals' reading speed with a generative font model and bayesian optimization

Abstract

Digital text has become one of the primary ways of exchanging knowledge, but text needs to be rendered to a screen to be read.We present AdaptiFont, a human-in-the-loop system that is aimed at interactively increasing readability of text displayed on a monitor. To this end, we frst learn a generative font space with non-negative matrix factorization from a set of classic fonts. In this space we generate new true-type-fonts through active learning, render texts with the new font, and measure individual users' reading speed. Bayesian optimization sequentially generates new fonts on the fy to progressively increase individuals' reading speed. The results of a user study show that this adaptive font generation system fnds regions in the font space corresponding to high reading speeds, that these fonts signifcantly increase participants' reading speed, and that the found fonts are signifcantly diferent across individual readers.