I've recently run across a few folks talking about accessible designs and some of the values placed on various typefaces by designers. One of the newer thoughts is that of mimicking nature's sometimes small subtle differences to help break symmetry and make visual cues stand out more, without getting in the way. These values have been talked about before, but this time with an eye towards accessibility and in particular even Dyslexia.
It is with Olivia King's new typeface "Inclusive Sans" that I can definitely see the inspiration as well as the clever usefulness of asymmetry where it's needed most. Just take a look for example, at how the lower case "a" suddenly becomes more readable, but distinctive. Its hole being slightly askew compared to "o" and others.
Take a look: Inclusive Sans — Olivia King
It's available on Google Fonts (which can be downloaded as well and added to projects like OpenRefine, I think? - not a font license expert - looks at license and GitHub project).
I think "Inclusive sans" would be an ideal new default typeface for OpenRefine which solves many of the problems I myself have witnessed (and err'd upon ! - I'm looking at you 0O and Il1 and others!).
One way to perhaps help users would be to have in preferences an "accessibility" tab that offers a few options:
- eventually Dark Mode
- default OpenRefine font "Inclusive sans", with options to toggle back to the default of "Arial" with fallback to "sans-serif" (which is what I think I saw in our
common.cssfile) and packaging "Inclusive sans" to save our users the hassle of downloading the font, installing, changing defaults in their browser, etc. - and many of the other accessibility things we talked about and have issues already open about...
Thoughts?