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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

"Results showed a small, but significant advantage in response times for words written in a sans serif font."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20445911.2011.5...

"Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts."

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2513383.2513447

and here a whole book about that question

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/53344

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Dyslexia associations have recommended Comic Sans as a font that allows for easier reading comprehension. Experts say that opposition to Comic Sans is ableist: https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/the-reason-comic-sans-is-a-pu...

I, for one, think all State Dept cables should henceforth be transmitted in Comic Sans, so as to provide maximum accessibility.

While I really hope the claim that hating on Comic Sans being ableist is facetious, I do kinda like the font, and use Fantasque Sans[^1] in my terminal.

[^1]: https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans

I use Comic Mono and Comic Sans as my system monospace and regular fonts, respectively. If nothing else, it makes reading LinkedIn a lot more fun. And to be quite honest it's nice to read in general.

That last link (the book) is a fantastic literature review, but every chapter basically concludes that despite some results going each way, there is no statistically significant readability difference between sans serif and serif typefaces, whether on paper or on screen, or whether the reader has various disabilities.

I had a laugh about that.

Isn't 'small but significant' quite ironic.

Fascinating, thank you

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