Fonts, Dyslexia, and Accessibility

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

I wanted to discuss the fonts used in EVE. The font style is sans seriff in most cases, commas look very close to periods, and the kerning between letters is very narrow, which can cause letters like “dlb” to appear like “db”.

EVE is a great game because it’s got something for everyone. We can change our UI colors to better suit players who are colorblind, and that’s fantastic. I’d love to see more accessibility in EVE, and if we can one day load in fonts, choose fonts, or if there’s another accessibility solution that makes EVE User Interfaces tolerable for those with dyslexia, I think you’ll win some brownie points in the accessibility department of game dev

1 Like
2

Oh the cries that would echo through new eden if they added comic sans as an option.

Before the lynch mob forms? Comic sans is considered to be dyslexic friendly.

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3

We already have pretty good unicode symbol support for a video game, but they should also add emoji support.

4

As long the only person who sees it is the one who selected the font, I don’t see a problem with letting the user choose whatever font works best for them.

I’m not dyslexic, but I find the EVE font a little hard to read myself. Just old eyes, I suppose. I’d prefer a monospaced font or at least a choice of sans serif.

5

I also find the font hard to read and had to scale up the entire UI to compensate especially for the kerning. What about adding an option to use a font family such as Atkinson Hyperlegible? It’s purpose-made to be good for several types of vision impairment while looking good (and doesn’t get the stigma of comic sans), and is even free for commercial use. I love how it has clearly unambiguous letters.
Atkinson Hyperlegible Font - Braille Institute for more info and if people want to see what it looks like. I’m not affiliated with it at all but stumbled upon it when trying to find a good cross-platform and FOSS font. It supports a massive set of glyphs (not just the English Roman alphabet). It has an extended version that supports over 150 languages and several weights, as well as a monospaced version.

Alternatively, could we have the option to select our own system font on the client side? I know that’s not as easy as it sounds, and the designers of the UI for EVE might cry just thinking about both the integration and their hard work already done, but the text is hard to read. No qualifiers: I have 19/20 vision and still struggle.

For comparison purposes: I’m viewing EVE Online fullscreen at 1920x1080 resolution on an LCD flatscreen monitor with good antiglare coating. 60Hz refresh, make and model Dell E2414H, which should be sufficient (despite being DVI it’s technically HD).