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Comment by GarnetFloride | Hacker News Reader

The Braille Institute has a a big interest in helping people with low vision and a few years ago commissioned a highly legible font Atkinson Hyperlegible https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont They did a lot of work making sure it was easy to read by working with actual people.

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The page itself is typeset in the font: a nice way to see it in action. The only really jarring idiosyncrasy for me is the backwards slash on the zero, instead of a forward slash. I wonder if there's a specific legibility argument for that, or whether one could just reflect the 0 to fix it without losing anything.

I'd venture to guess it's to avoid confounding it with a Ø used in Scandinavian languages.

Yes, that is the exact reason. One of the designers mentions it here:

https://youtu.be/wjE5eHLICzc?si=no+tracking&t=330

I’ve used it professionally on some occasions and tend to reach for it when a) its purported value outweighs its crude utilitarian aesthetic, or b) I want to loudly signal my awareness of “inclusive design”.

There is no perfect typeface. Atkinson is a very effective body typeface, but does suffer as a headline. So use something else. It's just a variant of Helvetica, Arial, and a bunch of others. I do wish founderies would provide typeface variants with the principles of hyper legibility applied. A Times New Roman Hyperlegible could be really handy even though it was designed for the newspaper so it is good at being read at small sizes to pack more content in a column. Inclusive design shouldn't be an afterthought. The principles of hyper legibility came from hard won lessons from interstate signage, transit signage, and flight deck control design. If you design it in from the beginning inclusivity is free.

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