As someone teaching their 4 year old to read right now, I don't buy it. The text is long on "friendly" and random stuff like that, but that's not what I'm looking for in a font for kids.<p>Just off the top of my head the "v" in there doesn't have a point on the bottom, which is one of the confusions my daughter has ("u" vs "v"). And I don't think the "n" needs the serif on the right foot, as that's not the "platonic" shape of a lower case N. I do appreciate that their lower case "a" is more like a handwritten one, as is the lower case "g".<p>I've been going through the Teach Your Child to Read[0] book, and it introduces a "learner-friendly" font, which <i>actually</i> helps. It has special glyphs for "th", for example, and other font tricks like making silent letters smaller, and different variants for the vowels depending on their sound. Eventually, those tricks are minimized and the kid is reading a normal font, though.<p>In other words, I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, but this font doesn't seem to be concretely designed in that way, and I'm put off by the vague "friendly" type stuff it seems to be focusing on.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...</a>
> unpublished study is finding that adding prosody to text improves children’s comprehension.<p>As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).<p>In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.<p>But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.
For all their talk about how they think this will help kids read, I didn't see any evidence that they actually did any studies on whether or not this font has any affect at all.
I don't know about kids or reading disabilities, but it looks nice and does feel "friendly" to read. Having the ability to vary and animate a lot of parameters will certainly enable some neat web designs.<p>Edit: I'm poking at this and it seems like the only way to do the animation is via the font designer's library. I'll be a lot more excited when this is supported by more options.
Without the kid branding and the name "Kermit," which piggybacks off of cultural feelings for marketing, this feels more like just another font. I found the body text hard to read and didn't realize at first it was using the font.<p>I read a lot of books on my ereader and generally find the best comfort comes from bold text and some kind of serifs. I really blaze through my books though, so I don't know if that actually improves my comprehension or just makes it feel better to skim.
It is unfortunate that this sort of mathematics wasn't available to the students who were creating the Euler font.<p><a href="https://tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19/euler-summary.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19/euler-summary.pdf</a><p>Another consideration which I'm surprised wasn't made use of is that letter recognition is overwhelmingly focused on the upper half of letters --- ages ago, there was a typeface developed which took advantage of that, providing variants of letters where the lower halves were modified so as to indicate how a particular letter used in a particular word was pronounced, so that the "c" in "cat" had a different lower portion from the "c" in "cent".<p>That said, I'd really like it if they would publish the software used to make this font, ideally as opensource --- I have a type design project which stalled against the need to create variants for each size, working from an incompleat set of letterforms at each size (the only letters available in the compleat size range from the sample I had were "n" and "N", go figure) --- I believe this would let me finish up all the sizes of the design.
I really like this. Just some anecdata from someone without a reading disability but who doesn’t love reading, I feel like does make reading easier for me. Maybe it’s just because I like the way it looks more than most fonts, I’m not sure, but I’m happy this exists and research is being done in this area. I’ll be trying this out in my email client and other applications if the fonts are available for download.
Is there any evidence that any font has a positive impact on reading (beyond obviously bad fonts being slow)? I'm very suspicious of this whole idea.
Is this open / free / something we can download and try out?<p>I did a super-brief search on the page but "download" didn't turn up any results. Does anyone else know where we can download this from?
When new fonts are released, they always include what they tried to improve: readability, comprehension, etc. Just once I'd like to know what they sacrificed.
Maybe it's easy for kids to read, but I found the font too bold and the letters too close-together to read comfortably. I gave up before I could read all their justifications for those decisions.<p>But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for me.
This is anecdotal and I hope someone who has some research experience can say whether this is true or not generally, but I recently got a Kindle and found that if I use really large font sizes where there are fewer than 50 words on a page it's easier for me to stay engaged. Maybe this has something to do with cognitive load or chunking information. Some fonts look quite a bit better at these large sizes. So for me I don't think typography alone is sufficient. I think the interaction between a large font size and a typography that looks pleasing at a large font size helps with engagement.
I find the font very readable and somewhat unique.<p>I would have preferred a double-storey a instead of single-storey ɑ. I find it more readable and easier to distinguish against a o.<p>Though I can understand the need to be similar to handwriting. I'm guessing they had a long debate to decide between a and ɑ.
Trying to find out how this font is licenced is painfully impossible on both the linked Microsoft website and the atrocious <a href="https://kermit-font.com/" rel="nofollow">https://kermit-font.com/</a> homepage.<p>Regardless of the claimed merits of this font (I'm not dyslectic and this font just strains my eyes), I hold the opinion that any effort like this by a megacorp like Microsoft should be approached by them from a charitable angle. If this font isn't permissively licenced (I.e., Microsoft bought it and liberated it from creator Underware) and is just an Office exclusive, it is pointless, and possibly harmless (like that font which OpenDyslexic is based on).
I thought the font was overall very pleasant easy to read… except for every variation of it beyond the standard weight. Every thin, bold, and italicized version of it I thought was actually quite difficult to read.
The wide (and growing, which is great) variety of fonts designed to be easily readable are so interesting to me because they all start with similar aims, use different metrics, and come up with wildly varying font designs.<p>Take Kermit, Inter, OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Bookerly, and my personal favourite Lexend. They are all expertly designed, do great work at improving readability and legibility, though have very different target readers. Some look hand-drawn/modern/geometric, are bold/thin, single/double storey a, I with/without crossbars, t/l/q/y with/without flick, 3 with/without flat top, are slanted/upright by default, or have `font-variation-settings` to control all of the aforementioned.<p>Searching "easily readable fonts" brings up even more choice, some of which seem awesome and I'll have to look into. It's a shame that good scientific evidence on font readability/legibility is so difficult to find, as at best there's a case study showing that the font is beneficial to a small, select group of readers, and at worst (Sans Forgetica-style) it's the same but there's a follow-up study a few years later showing that the improvements are negligible or nonexistent.
As a left handed person I learned to write everything differently.<p>I cross the t's going the opposite way that this font recommends, and I write some numbers (like 4 and 7) with some strokes going the "wrong" way.<p>Most of the world (writing included) isn't designed for lefties. But sometimes doing things the "wrong" way works better when you're in the minority. I'm not sure if this font helps or hurts.
The typefaces we commonly see in print and advertising are among the greatest artistic achievements our species has produced.<p>Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives. Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar role in our culture.<p>In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.<p>Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears exceptionally sloppy as a result.<p>Kermit will not survive.
> Combining science and design creativity can improve a child’s confidence in reading, changing their trajectory in life. Kermit is, therefore, ...<p>You don't get away with just slapping out a statement like that unless you provide a scientific paper to back up <i>your</i> work.
Anecdotally, this is amazing. I don’t have dyslexia but I do have analogous reading issues due to BVD.<p>It’s like I’m wearing my prism lenses. I wonder if a less cartoony font could capture these qualities.
> While we haven’t implemented automatic prosody yet<p>That is a really interesting use for LLMs I would never have even considered. The example video with JFK's speech is pretty compelling.
The interesting idea to me was the idea of notating captions with stressing / emphasis.<p>It would be really neat to have automatic transcription that could annotate the result accordingly.
As someone teaching his kid to read, this font doesn't seem to help.<p>Most of the arguments seem to be biased by "what an adult think is playful and fun", while my kid has a very different view of things.<p>Things like lower vs upper case are a struggle for him, it basically forces him to remember twice as many letters. Also the handwriting style just makes letters harder to recognize, especially for n and r, u and v, etc.
If you want to read it on a site that doesn't mess with scrolling, try here :<p><a href="https://kermit-font.com" rel="nofollow">https://kermit-font.com</a>
It's a good-looking informal font, with a very flexible model, and an interesting way to animate it. Wonderful! I'm happy to see what have they achieved technically and aesthetically.<p>Any claims of pedagogical helpfulness should be made very cautiously though, before there are multiple independent studies of that.
Anyone remember Microsoft's McZee font from Creative Writer/Fine Artist?<p><a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/mczee" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/mczee</a><p>This was my go-to many years ago!
I remember asking a few dyslexics what they thought about "dyslexia friendly fonts" and all of them thought it was a gimmick. I've only skimmed the article, but I didn't find references to studies of how this font actually helped?
It feels like poor taste to force smooth scrolling on a page that is intended probably to be read by a target audience who is more likely to use assistive technologies than not.
I'd be happy to try it out in Kindle, to combat focus problems. Open dyslexia was somehow helping for some time, but I reverted it back eventually.
Nit Picks:<p>Underlines with letters that go down (g, y, j, p, q ) don't keep the underline continuous.<p>Kerning on the emdash (—) is a little too tight
Cool font bro, but what's the license? I can "use" it in Microsoft Office? That raises more questions than it answers.<p>This is why I only use Google fonts. They're all permissively licensed so I don't have to worry about anything.
This is a font by adults to adults: the ones in charge of the KPIs.<p>The font is cool, I have no gripes with it. The things I can't stand is the absolute corporate BS coated with a heavy layer of weak "science" and "empowering kids".<p>If the work is good, just let it do the talking. No need for waterboarding us with waves of corporate slop.<p>Again, the font is fine. Congratulations to the people who worked on it.
It's a nice looking font but kind of hilarious that the official website [0] is entirely baffling! What do those icons mean? What is the license? And mainly: how the f can I GET the damn thing???<p>Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...<p>[0] <a href="https://kermit-font.com/" rel="nofollow">https://kermit-font.com/</a>