Glossary

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Adaptive Typography(also: Context-Aware Typography, Dynamic Typography)

The practice of adjusting text presentation - font size, weight, line spacing, character spacing, contrast, and colour - automatically or semi-automatically in response to the user's current needs and context. Adaptive typography goes beyond static accessibility settings by…

Affective Captions(also: Affective Captioning, Emotive Captions)

Captions that convey not only the spoken words but also the emotional qualities of speech — such as valence (positive vs. negative tone) and arousal (intensity) — typically through typographic modulations like font-color, font-weight, or font-size, and increasingly through…

Bionic Reading(also: Bionic Font, Bold Fixation Points)

A typographic technique that bolds the first few letters of each word to create artificial fixation points, guiding the eye through text more quickly and helping maintain reading focus. The technique leverages the brain ability to complete word recognition from partial visual…

Character Spacing(also: Letter Spacing, Tracking)

The horizontal space between individual characters in a line of text. Research has shown that increasing character spacing significantly improves reading speed and accuracy for people with dyslexia. This effect is attributed to reduced visual crowding — the phenomenon where…

Expressive Captions(also: Affective Captions, Emotion Captions, Typographic Captions)

Captions that go beyond literal word-for-word transcription to convey the prosodic, emotional, or speaker-identity information that traditional captions strip out. Expressive captions may modulate font weight, size, colour, position, or animation to signal loudness, pitch,…

Glyph Substitution(also: GSUB)

A typographic process in which one or more characters in a text are replaced with alternative visual forms (glyphs) based on context, language, or stylistic requirements. In OpenType fonts, the GSUB table defines rules for substitutions such as ligatures (combining two…

Italic Font Style(also: italics, oblique)

A slanted or cursive-style variant of a typeface, traditionally used for emphasis, titles, or foreign words. Eye-tracking research demonstrates that italic fonts create significant accessibility barriers—Arial Italic, for example, showed the worst reading performance across…

Kanji(also: Han Characters (in Japanese))

Logographic characters of Chinese origin used in the Japanese writing system alongside the two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. Modern Japanese uses about 2,000-3,000 commonly-occurring kanji, but the full character set exceeds 10,000 glyphs, and historical or literary…

Legibility

The visual clarity with which individual characters, words, and blocks of text can be distinguished and recognised. Legibility is influenced by font choice (sans-serif fonts are generally more legible on screen), font size (minimum 12px recommended for dyslexic users), letter…

Line Spacing(also: Leading, Line Height, Line-Height)

The vertical distance between lines of text, controlled in CSS by the line-height property. Adequate line spacing is important for readability and accessibility, particularly for people with low vision, dyslexia, or cognitive disabilities. Research shows that both younger and…

Monospaced Font(also: fixed-width font, fixed-pitch font, non-proportional font)

A typeface in which every character occupies the same horizontal space, regardless of its width. Examples include Courier, Consolas, and Monaco. Research shows monospaced fonts like Courier lead to shorter fixation durations for people with dyslexia, making them a strong choice…

OpenDyslexic(also: Open Dyslexic)

A free, open-source typeface specifically designed to improve readability for people with dyslexia. The font uses heavier bottom portions on letters to help prevent visual rotation and uses unique letter shapes to reduce confusion between similar characters. However,…

OpenType(also: OpenType Font)

A font format developed by Microsoft and Adobe that supports advanced typographic features including glyph substitution (GSUB) and glyph positioning (GPOS). OpenType fonts are critical for correctly rendering complex scripts such as Indian languages, Arabic, and Thai, where the…

Proportional Font(also: variable-width font)

A typeface in which characters have varying widths based on their natural proportions—a narrow "i" takes less space than a wide "m". Most fonts used in everyday reading are proportional, including Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana. While proportional fonts create a more…

Relative Font Sizing(also: Relative Units, Scalable Typography, Flexible Font Sizes)

The practice of specifying text sizes using relative units (such as em, rem, or percentages) rather than absolute units (such as pixels or points), allowing text to scale when users adjust their browser or system font size settings. Relative font sizing is an important…

Ruby Annotation(also: Ruby Text, Furigana, Ruby Markup)

Small glossing text placed above, beside, or below a base character to indicate pronunciation or meaning — most commonly used for Japanese furigana (kana reading hints above kanji), but also applied in Chinese bopomofo/pinyin, Korean hangul aids, and multilingual teaching…

Sans-Serif Font(also: sans serif, grotesque font)

A typeface that lacks the small projecting lines (serifs) at the ends of letter strokes. Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana are generally recommended for screen readability and are often preferred for users with dyslexia. Research shows sans-serif fonts lead to…

Serif Font(also: roman typeface)

A typeface with small decorative lines or strokes (serifs) at the ends of letter strokes. Common serif fonts include Times New Roman, Garamond, and Georgia. While traditionally associated with print legibility, serif fonts have shown mixed results for screen readability.…

Speech-modulated Typography(also: Speech-driven Typography, Prosody-driven Typography)

A design technique in which the visual properties of text — typically font weight, width, or size on a variable-font axis — are modulated in real time by features extracted from a corresponding speech signal, such as pitch, loudness, rhythm, or an inferred emotional-arousal…

Speed-Comprehension Trade-off(also: Speed-Accuracy Trade-off in Reading)

An empirical pattern in readability research: typographic, layout, and presentation choices that increase reading speed often reduce comprehension accuracy, and vice versa. For example, sans-serif faces and shorter line lengths tend to support faster reading but may yield lower…

Text Justification(also: Text Alignment, Justified Text)

The alignment of text along the left and/or right margins of a text block. Left-aligned (ragged right) text has even spacing between words and an uneven right edge, while fully justified (left-right) text has even margins on both sides but variable word spacing. Some…

Tiresias(also: Tiresias Screenfont, Tiresias Font Family)

A family of typefaces developed in 1998 by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) specifically designed for legibility on screen displays, particularly television subtitling. Named after the blind prophet of Greek mythology, Tiresias became one of the most widely…

Typeface Classification(also: Font Classification, Typeface Categories)

The set of broad categories used to describe and compare typefaces. The most common groupings are: serif (letters with small projecting strokes at terminals, e.g. Times, Roboto Serif), sans-serif (no terminal strokes, e.g. Helvetica, Arial, Roboto), slab serif (heavy…

Typographic Modulation(also: Typographic Variation, Dynamic Typography)

Systematic variation of a typeface's visual parameters — weight, width, slant, size, colour, letter spacing, baseline shift, opacity — to carry information beyond the literal words, typically driven by an external signal such as speech pitch, loudness, emotional arousal, or…

Variable Font(also: OpenType Variable Font, Parametric Font)

A font file that contains multiple design variations along one or more continuous axes — weight, width, slant, optical size, or custom axes — allowing any intermediate value to be rendered at run time. Defined in the OpenType 1.8 specification (2016), variable fonts reduce file…

Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting(also: VSTF)

Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF) is a content presentation method that formats text based on its syntactic structure, using indentation, line breaks, and visual grouping to align with the grammatical structure of sentences. Research has shown VSTF can improve online…

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