Digital Text, Readability, and Accessibility

Whether a notice, disclosure, or label could be seen and read by the people it was meant for is an empirical question, and Dr. Sawyer measures it. He founded and directs The Readability Consortium at the University of Central Florida, where controlled studies test how type size, typeface, weight, spacing, and background change legibility, reading speed, and comprehension.

The cases include auto-renewal and cancellation flows and other dark-pattern claims, notice of online terms and arbitration clauses, fine print in consumer disclosures, type-size requirements on labels, and website and app accessibility for readers with low vision. In each, he measures what a reader could see and read on the actual screen or page, at the size, contrast, and viewing time it was given. Whether text was conspicuous is for the court; how readable it was can be tested.

His research, published in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and Ergonomics, shows that different fonts make different readers faster, measures legibility at a glance and over complex backgrounds, and quantifies the legibility cost of typographic style. His group also studies how format affects children’s reading speed and comprehension, and how visual span limits reading speed in dyslexia. He is a co-author of Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach. The methods are controlled reading experiments and at-a-glance legibility testing, run with representative readers on the device in question.