That is just so wrong on so many levels. You clearly have no idea how education and different people learn. That and you’re a designer who wants to make things more legible but you are against a font that makes things more legible? Comic Sans is used so often as its one of the easiest fonts to read. I pick CS almost every time as I do not have to strain to read it. CS is great for many school children and adults alike. Another reason CS is used is for letter formation. The a's in CS are much better then the a's in the other main fonts.
On the contrary, most of my family is involved in education so I have a lot of exposure to it. Along with design, education is one of my interests and if I hadn't become a designer I would probably have gone into education at some level. I've worked with education establishments from pre-schools to universities where legibility and accessibility are always high on the agenda.
Without writing a dissertation on the subject; there are too many other factors involved to simplify the argument down to 'Comic Sans is easy/not easy to read'.
For instance, font choice should be informed by the amount of text being displayed. For non-dyslexics, large blocks of text are easier to read in a serif font like TNR because the serifs allow the eye to scan quicker between letterforms and words. That's why novels are predominantly printed in serif typefaces.
Colour and contrast, type size, spacing (kerning and tracking) and line height (leading) also play a very important part in legibility.
Road signs are usually set in large sans-serif fonts and white against a coloured background because it makes them easier to read from distance and quicker to read as you're moving past them at speed.
The study I alluded to earlier suggests that Comic Sans improves retention of information precisely because it's difficult to read and students have to concentrate harder to read it.
Although there are no large scale studies on typeface and dyslexia, there have been a few
like this one which show that the key characteristics of 'good' typefaces for dyslexics are:
- Sans-serif
- Roman (not italic)
- Monospaced (all letters are the same width)
- Clear ascenders and descenders
- Distinguished letterforms (b and d aren't just a mirror of each other)
- Differentiation between characters (lowercase L and 1 should be different)
The study reviewed 12 typefaces. CS wasn't one of them but 'OpenDyslexic', which was designed for dyslexics and is loosely based on CS, was included.
The top three fonts were:
Helvetica and Arial are very similar sans serif fonts and Courier is a typewriter font.
OpenDyslexic shares a lot of the qualities that makes people claim that CS is a 'good' dyslexic font, yet OpenDyslexic didn't rank well at all in the study.
Saying that, there are typefaces for people with learning difficulties which appear to have more thought put into their design beyond 'it's a bit like Comic Sans'.
FS Me font was designed by FontSmith in partnership with Mencap. Every letter of FS Me was tested for its appeal and readability with a range of learning disability groups across the UK. Guess what – it looks nothing like CS.
The argument about the lowercase 'a' in CS being similar to the handwriting we're all taught in school is a valid one. However, the majority of students learn to move past Letterland and Twinkl around KS2. And, as I've just shown, there are better options for SEN children (and adults) in the form of clear sans serif typefaces.
The only reason CS is so ubiquitous is that it come pre-packaged with Windows and looks a bit different to the 'normal' typefaces. I can see the case for using it in pre-school or at KS1 to help children develop their handwriting (although as I said before, there are better fonts than CS). There's also a case for using it if you're producing a comic strip (but there are better comic typefaces).
Choosing a typeface comes down to the suitability of any given font for the intended purpose of the document or text that is being displayed. 99.99% of the time, CS is not the most suitable font to choose. It really is as simple as that.
