Din 1450, recommended for barrier-free reading | Hacker News Reader

Din 1450, recommended for barrier-free reading

linotype.com

71 pointsJdeBP55 comments

> Monotype fonts, which have been specially adapted to these recommendations, carry the name affix, "1450".

None of those commas should be present, and they significantly change the meaning of the sentence. With them (especially the first), it means that all Monotype fonts have been specially adapted to these recommendations and carry The Name Affix, which is “1450”. The commas serve equivalently to parentheses: “Monotype fonts (which have been specially adapted to these recommendations) carry the name affix ("1450").”

What they meant was: “Monotype fonts which have been specially adapted to these recommendations carry the name affix "1450".” That is: the subset of Monotype fonts so adapted are identified by the presence of the “1450” name affix.

A remark like this would normally be off-topic on HN, but I mention it because (a) the line threw me, for a couple of readings, and I only resolved it because I know Monotype fonts have been round much longer than this DIN 1450 thing and by inference from the next sentence; and (b) correct language usage is at least as important as font when it comes to “barrier-free reading”.

Some of the other commas in the article are also wrong in the same and similar ways. I’m curious whether there might be something about comma usage or sentence structure in the native language of the author, which I’m guessing isn’t English. (There are a few other mildly unusual or clumsy word choices and sentence structures, and a few minor errors. Given the context, probably German.)

It's fairly obviously primarily targetting a German market. There are no French and Spanish versions, and I suspect that the English version is there as the fallback for whatever international market there is.

The German language version has fewer commas:

* https://www.linotype.com/de/6990/din-1450.html

I wonder how badly Hacker News would have coped with a submission in German. (-:

"Schriften von Monotype, die speziell an diese Empfehlungen angepasst wurden, tragen den Namenszusatz „1450“."

The commas around the “which” clause seem to follow German rules for embedded subordinate clauses:

https://www.germanveryeasy.com/comma

the only extraneous comma is after "affix"

No, the first two commas are extraneous as well.

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-of-essen... :

> Essential clauses modify key words and are important to the main point of a sentence. Nonessential clauses provide superfluous information that, while interesting, does not change the main point of a sentence. Nonessential clauses are offset by punctuation such as commas or parentheses to indicate the clause as an aside.

With the commas, it is a nonessential clause, which means the meaning should stay the same if it is removed. And that would turn the sentence into this:

> Monotype fonts carry the name affix "1450".

But that isn't the meaning of the sentence. It's not true that Monotype fonts (all of them, in general) have "1450" in their names. Only the ones that follow the recommendation do.

This is the kind of assertive falseness I associate with ChatGPT!

> Some of the other commas in the article are also wrong in the same and similar ways. I’m curious whether there might be something about comma usage or sentence structure in the native language of the author, which I’m guessing isn’t English. (There are a few other mildly unusual or clumsy word choices and sentence structures, and a few minor errors.)

Yes this translation from German. The comma fits the way German grammar recommends it. Some other clues: DIN is a German standard organization and the company advertising this new font is a German Ltd (GmbH).

Perhaps the translator was American. A lot of American text looks like a pepper shaker full off commas was upended over it.

At least we don't have all these 'u's polluting our words! I'll die before I spell 'color' differently!

> “Monotype fonts which have been specially adapted to these recommendations carry the name affix "1450".”

Even this isn't wholly clear. They should have said:

> “Monotype fonts that have been specially adapted to these recommendations carry the name affix "1450".”

The word “that” defines the subject of the sentence; the word “which” describes the already-defined subject. This is a rule of thumb usually expressed as: “‘that’ defines; ‘which’ describes”.

cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36092771

If we're going to be pedantic about language use (and it appears that we are): "cf" is short for the Latin for "compare [with]". To me, that only makes sense when the reference is something very analogous, e.g. you're talking about caramelising onions and you cite an article about caramelising carrots. Most of the time it's used, including this time, it would be more appropriate to just say "see also".

This entire thread is peak HN lmao

TIL — going forward I'll use see for 'compare' and cf for 'contrast'

Or use 'nb' - nota bene

Monotype "1450" fonts are specially adapted to these recommendations.

They're using the words "Monotype Fonts" as a type shop, a brand, a company...I forget which but I set type decades ago and remember the name. They're not referring to 'monotype fonts' as a type of font, like serif or sans serif.

I feel the issue applies in this case also, unless all of Monotype Fonts' fonts are DIN 1450 fonts.

Perhaps because nouns are usually capitalized in German.

Seriously tho, does it really matter that much? There are native English speakers who write worse than that.

It matters that if you are writing illegibly even the ultra legible typeface is not going to help that much

Even worse, when reading this sentence in the comments, I thought it was referring to monospace coding fonts, which happen to share the same "legibility features" as required by DIN 1450 (tailed l, dotted 0, etc.)

As this sentence immediately follows a paragraph introducing the new standard, I would probably go with something like "The affix '1450' is used to designate those monotype fonts which have been specially adapted to these recommendations."

Now I am wondering if the different rules for verb placement in German and English contribute to the difficulty of punctuating translations unambiguously.

What you're seeing here is absolutely English written by a German. In German, restrictive clauses are separated by commas. This language feature seeps into English written by Germans by means of interference.

One of the important differences seems to be more open shapes on such as c, e, 6 and 9. This is a major improvement; I’ve never understood why so many fonts curl around so far as they do, because it definitely harms distinctions.

They’ve introduced dotted zero in Neue Frutiger 1450, which I presume means DIN 1450 specifies some such thing. This confuses me, because the ambiguity it introduces with 8 is much worse (for frequency of relevance) than the ambiguity it resolves with O (capital o). Coding monospaces can benefit from dotted or slashed zeroes, and variable-stroke-width serifs can get quite a nice thin slash which makes it clearly neither 8 nor O, but in uniform-stroke-width sans-serifs designed for general-purpose language usage, I’ve just never understood why anyone would do it. It’s obviously worse.

The Unterscheidbarkeit von Schriftzeichen und Ziffern section of the standard appears to be the right place to look.

Meta: Ironic how the website does not render correctly in Google Chrome on Android. I feel that web design has become rather complicated these days, but surely it's not an impossible task to make websites work for more than one device?

Same on Safari for iPhone… The page is completely illegible.

I basically had a blank page, but using the reader mode you can read the content

It’s not complicated if you are a pro, but this is probably just laziness or an intern or something similar happening.

If you have to be a pro to make a website that works....

Modern development is complex enough that we do pay professionals to know how to handle all/most of the edge cases.

This is the reason why front end developers command so much money. The amount of work required to keep a website without breaking every year or two is ridiculous. And every time you want to update a dependency that's at least a full day of work. Compare that to backend software written in Cobol or Fortran that is still supporting critical infrastructure and services like manufacturing and finance with little to no modifications to the codebase in decades, except for maybe APIs to interface with modern applications and UIs, and these APIs don't change much either.

... and with javascript disabled I get an inaccessible error from Cloudflare (error 1020), would that also count as "barrier"?

ios safari here, I could not read a single word everything was left justified and blocked by a white gutter. Lol, will not trust their readability opinions.

The actual DIN 1450:2013-04 standard is available from the likes of https://www.beuth.de/en/standard/din-1450/170093157 .

Given how this site looks on mobile, I'm not sure I can trust their opinion on barrier-free reading

Atkinson Hyperlegible [1] is a great free alternative, I think.

https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont

A U.S. institution has probably not considered DIN 1450 conformance, but it would be interesting if it turned out that it was conformant.

The Bigelow & Holmes Go fonts claim DIN 1450 conformance.

* https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts

Blue Highway is a font with a similar purpose of roadway readability:

https://www.dafont.com/blue-highway.font

"Blue Highway is a sans-serif design inspired by the FHWA Series of Standard Alphabets, popularly known as Highway Gothic, from the United States Department of Transportation."

Oof, that lowercase 'g'... Is it just me or does it look completely out of place, like it's from a different font?

Strictly speaking, Blue Highway, like Expressway, Interstate, Traffic, Overpass, and several others, is inspired by the U.S. federal standard. Although a font expert with a magnifying glass is probably required to spot some of the differences, I suspect. (-:

* https://typodermicfonts.com/expressway/

* https://www.fonts4free.net/traffic-11027-font.html

* https://github.com/RedHatOfficial/Overpass

I find it hilarious that after clicking on a link about "barrier free reading" on my phone, I'm taken to a page with 3 sections: the left section is entirely blank, the right section has about 8 words in an enormous font, and the bottom section has the left half of a cookie permission pop-up.

So a separate font for features that should be OpenType variations. Glad to see that spirit is still alive over at Linotype.

Meanwhile in the real world, Inter is still widely rising, with lots of OpenType variations and variable weights.

It’s funny because for all the talk of legibility, the text cuts off on my iPad.

On Safari on iPhone as well.

I work in GMP manufacturing of drugs now (every word and letter has to be copied and transcribed over and over perfectly through the whole process) and it has really revealed to me how bizarre the English alphabet is from a getting text right standpoint. Is that a 0 or O on this copy of a copy of some text or handwriting I’m reading? Is it an l or I or 1? Is that a 7? Hard to know since putting the horizontal tick mark in the middle of the 7 isn’t allowed there. This font makes some good changes I wish were implemented everywhere.

This site is completely unusable on my phone's browser.

Missed opportunity to introduce the term Keming

This site is totally unreadable on Firefox for iOS , which is ironic .

$500 for a font? Is this an ad?

That’s not too expensive for a niche professional font like this one.

This is how comprehensive font families are priced.

https://www.fontshop.com/families/neue-helvetica/buy

Idk. Font pricing always felt wrong -- but then again, it is incredibly painstaking and specialized work to design one.

This site is about barrier free reading but I can't read it on my phone.

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