Enhancement of text readability using ClearType:
This was a very interesting paper. The main premise was that a majority of people read better with cleartype fonts than without. To test their hypotheses they gave users two tasks -
1. Scanning task - Here the users were asked to count the number of occurences of a particular word (e.g red) in a given text frame in tabular form. According to their studies use of cleartype led to an increase of about 8% in the speed of users in the scanning task.
2. Reading task - Here users were given a series of passages to read and their times were measured. The speedup in this case was about 5-6% with the use of cleartype averaged over all users.
By itself the results looked quite ordinary, but the real interesting part was that about 30% of users did better using non-cleartype fonts! this also means that the remaining 70% saw a higher speedup than the above numbers indicate. Presumably a lot of questions followed this paper -
1. Does a person know about his preference? Can he find out in any way?
2. What kind of monitors did they use? (laptop computers)
3. Could there be a possible effect of age on user speeds?
4. Why was this difference seen? Any physiological factors causing this?
5. They confirmed that they used a variety of fonts like ariel, times new roman and verdana.
6. One member from the audience felt strongly that during the scanning task users were simultaneously doing two tasks, this memory load effect possibly skewed results.
7. There was also a suggestion on trying the same study with different letter spacing.
The presenters surmise on the reasons behind this was that some users can notice the subpixel coloring that happens in non-cleartype fonts which possibly leads to slightly increased processing times to process those alphabets.