A psychophysically engineered Japanese font ‘ForeFinger-M’ suitable for tactile recognition

Abstract

Purpose: Sans serif fonts are well known as the better fonts for recognition and reading via low resolution sensory channels, such as low vision and touch. Although narrow Gothic-type Japanese fonts have been used for these channels, the tactile recognition performance never has been perfect and satisfactory. We investigate a possibility of developing a new font based on psychophysical experiments of tactile recognition. Method: A set of Japanese Kate-kana letters were raised for tactile observation using swell papers. Letter size was fixed to 1.58 cm in height, where recognition was about 80% correct in the previous experiments. Five different font styles, i.e., Mincho (similar to Times Roman), Gothic-Narrow, Gothic-Thick, Round-Gothic, and Schoolbook were compared their correct recognition rate and recognition time. Five Japanese subjects participated in the experiment. Confusion matrices were calculated for each font type. Using principles for better recognition we obtained from the analysis of the mat...