Barbara S. Chaparro, A. Dawn Shaikh and Alex Chaparro compared the Legibility two new Microsoft ClearType fonts, Cambria and Constantia, to the traditional serif font Times New Roman:
“This article introduces six new ClearType fonts developed by Microsoft. Legibility of two of the serif fonts, Cambria and Constantia, is compared to the traditional serif font Times New Roman. Results show that the legibility, as measured by the number of correct identifications of briefly presented characters, was highest for the new font Cambria, followed by Constantia, and then Times New Roman. Old style digits, such as 0,1, and 2, used in Constantia resulted in confusion with the letters o, l, and z. Times New Roman symbols were confused with both letters and other symbols.
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This study sought to investigate and compare the legibility of two new ClearType fonts, Cambria and Constantia, to the traditional serif font Times New Roman. Results show the legibility, as measured by the number of correct identifications of briefly presented characters, was highest for the new font Cambria, followed by Constantia, and then Times New Roman. Percent correct identification was high for the letter characters for all three fonts. Old style digits, such as 0,1, and 2, used in Constantia resulted in confusion with the letters o, l, and z. Symbols, which were confused with both letters and other symbols, were the most confused characters in Times New Roman. Overall, the findings were positive for the new ClearType fonts.
While it has been advised that the legibility of individual characters is not predictive of overall readability of a font (Tinker, 1963), the method used in this study allowed us to identify those characters that may be confused with other characters in a given font. Contextual cues when reading text may override letter confusion; however, there are instances where single character confusion could be problematic. For example, users trying to remember username and passwords for online accounts may confuse some letter-number combinations, such as zero and the letter ‘o’. International zip codes, inventory part numbers, and other mixed character values may also be impacted by such confusion. Character confusion may also play a role in safety. In a recent near-accident, an air traffic controller was reported to misread character codes on his monitor and accidentally sent an aircraft to a wrong location (BBC News, 2002).”
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Examining the Legibility of Two New ClearType Fonts
