As our intended audience of our Social Studies eBook is grade two, we acknowledge that there are many students in this age group with emerging literacy skills. Therefore we aimed to choose a font that had clearly shaped letters, in particular, a rounded “a”, while still maintaining a professional look. Our initial font choice was Century Gothic, which I have used for years whenever creating resources for division one students. Unfortunately, when we tested out that font on iBooks on an iPad, the font did not transfer and another less child-friendly font was substituted. We immediately recognized that we would run into formating issues if we did not use a font that was available on iOS devices. This began a process of trial and error to find the most suitable font that worked in iBooks on the iPad. After ruling out other popular child-friendly fonts such as Comic Sans, we decided upon Futura.
Additional research influenced our font style and formatting. We took into account Chong, Lim and Ling’s (2009) suggestions to consistently use the same, easy to read font in the ebook, to have different coloured fonts for headings and to keep the text left-aligned to increase scannability of the text.
Furthermore, our choice to use Futura is affirmed by recommendations for fonts that are dyslexia-friendly. The British Dyslexia Association’s Style Guide as well as their article on typefaces for dyslexia provided a good checklist for our font choice. Futura is a rounded, sans serif font and we ensured even spacing of the font to improve readability. Unfortunately, p and q in Futura are mirror images and capital I and lower case l are the same. However, after our trial and error process, we felt that Futura, although not perfect, was the best fit for our eBook.
References
BDA Technology (n.d.). Typefaces for Dyslexia. Retrieved from
http://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/
Chong, P. F., Lim, Y. P., & Ling, S. W. (2009). On the design preferences for Ebooks.
IETE Technical Review, 26(3), 213–222. doi:10.4103/0256-4602.50706
The British Dyslexia Association (n.d.). Dyslexia Style Guide. Retrieved from
http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/about-dyslexia/further-information/dyslexia-style-g
uide.html
Additional research influenced our font style and formatting. We took into account Chong, Lim and Ling’s (2009) suggestions to consistently use the same, easy to read font in the ebook, to have different coloured fonts for headings and to keep the text left-aligned to increase scannability of the text.
Furthermore, our choice to use Futura is affirmed by recommendations for fonts that are dyslexia-friendly. The British Dyslexia Association’s Style Guide as well as their article on typefaces for dyslexia provided a good checklist for our font choice. Futura is a rounded, sans serif font and we ensured even spacing of the font to improve readability. Unfortunately, p and q in Futura are mirror images and capital I and lower case l are the same. However, after our trial and error process, we felt that Futura, although not perfect, was the best fit for our eBook.
References
BDA Technology (n.d.). Typefaces for Dyslexia. Retrieved from
http://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/
Chong, P. F., Lim, Y. P., & Ling, S. W. (2009). On the design preferences for Ebooks.
IETE Technical Review, 26(3), 213–222. doi:10.4103/0256-4602.50706
The British Dyslexia Association (n.d.). Dyslexia Style Guide. Retrieved from
http://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/about-dyslexia/further-information/dyslexia-style-g
uide.html