Can you read this?
I received and email from someone whose site I reviewed in the Web Standards Group mail list, thanking me for the comments and complimenting me on my site. In her comments she suggested that I use “a serif font for your body text (not headings) for readability.”
This surprised me. I had never heard anyone suggest or promote the use of serifed fonts for the web before. I had replied to her email by chiming what I had always heard, and read, which was, that serifed fonts were more difficult to read. I then thought to myself I should look up some resource for this point. On Google, I came up with “How should text be presented within a website?” This article goes into incredible detail about user preference, reading speed and how different age groups perceive screen typefaces (fonts). One thing it showed was that reading times for 12pt Times Roman and 12pt Arial were the most quickly read fonts vs. other common fonts such as Courier New, Georgia, Century Schoolbook, Comic Sans MS, Tahoma, and Verdana. While this surprised me the article also shows that “Overall analysis of the participants’ font preference revealed that Times was significantly less preferred to all fonts except Schoolbook. Schoolbook was significantly less preferred to Verdana. Overall, Verdana was the most preferred font, while Times was the least preferred font …” The article continues to discuss user font preference, optimal line length and much more.
I am not promoting this article as dogma — it is a very well written, thought provoking read for anyone interested in web user-experience. It is part of a larger work on usability by The Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University’s Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory. They also publish the Usability News.