maybebyte

Ah, that does indeed appear squished! I'm glad someone said something. Thank you for following up with the additional information. It should be fixed now.

Thanks for the heads up. I have a couple of questions:

- What do you mean by squished?

- What device and browser are you using?

- Are all images affected or just certain ones?

A screenshot would help a lot if possible.

Interesting to see the font rendering differences crop up, I haven't tested on anything except Linux. For context, I wrote a hacky shell script that uses Harfbuzz and ImageMagick to generate the comparison images in a Fedora 41 virtual machine. It's possible that something in that software stack causes the characters to render differently.

Interesting distinction there. I didn't know that was the difference between legibility and readability. I'd really like to hear more about this. Do you have experience with fonts that strike a better balance, or know of reading material that discusses this subject in more detail?

I just added it under "Other Resources", thank you for the pointer. :)

This is a fair question/critique. As I understand it, this is a particular consideration for coders and readers with dyslexia, as they flip the letters. The thought process is that by making the characters distinct, it reduces this problem.

I learned about mirror glyphs through a document linked in the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA) website. For context, APCA is the system that aims to supplant current color calculation methods in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

https://apcacontrast.com/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338149302_Evaluatin...

The website is still up, it just loads slowly due to the increased viewership. Never had this much traffic before.

Hey, I'm a fan of your work. My font before this was Victor Mono, and I actually found it through your website. Do you publish the source code anywhere? I'd be interested to take a closer look at it.

This is good feedback, thank you. When I wrote the article, I erred on the side of too few comparison images rather than too many. What would you recommend for comparison blocks? "The five boxing wizards jump quickly" and maybe a fizzbuzz?

For what it's worth, I generated the comparison images with Harfbuzz and ImageMagick, so in theory I could publish the script and then anyone could make their own comparison images. Fair warning: it's a quick and dirty shell script, written only to get the job done.

You know, I've heard this idea about proportional fonts before and have been intrigued by the idea. I use Neovim running inside Alacritty as my code editor, though, so unsure if it'll work for me or not.

Going to check that font out - thank you for the suggestion. :)

Sure, I'll add it in. I'll post the links here as well just in case:

https://github.com/googlefonts/atkinson-hyperlegible-next-mo...

I'd recommend getting it from there rather than the Braille Institute's website since they require an email and EULA, but here's the other download link anyway.

https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

Also, Nerd Fonts added Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono in their v3.4.0 release.

https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/releases/tag/v3.4.0

With Nerd Fonts, I'd recommend downloading both and setting up a fallback system through fontconfig though. Unfortunately, some versions (Nerd Fonts, official download) are still missing the backtick/grave glyph.

https://github.com/googlefonts/atkinson-hyperlegible-next-mo...

After redesigning my website to use Atkinson Hyperlegible fonts, I switched my terminal and code editor to the monospace variant to properly test it. After a month of testing and positive experiences, I felt motivated to investigate further and write an article comparing Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono to JetBrains Mono and Fira Code.

The visual comparisons use examples from an accessibility paper on homoglyphs and mirror glyphs. I chose JetBrains Mono and Fira Code as a baseline, since many developers use these fonts and find them familiar.

While Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono excels at character distinction, nothing is perfect. I detail trade-offs in the "Caveats" section, below the installation instructions.

I'm curious to hear others' experiences and thoughts. I'm fascinated by what role font choice plays in legibility and accessibility, but the research is relatively sparse in this area.