TYPES AND EYES: THE PROBLEM
UR modern world submits with an ill grace to the nuisance of spectacles, but flatters itself that after all they afford a measure of civilization. Thirty-five years ago Dr. Émile Javal, a Parisian oculist, contested this self-complacent inference, believing the terrible increase of near sight among school children to be due rather to a defect than to an excess of civilization. He conceived that the trouble must lie in the material set for the eye to work upon, namely, the printed page. He therefore instituted a series of experiments to discover its defects from the point of view of hygiene. Being an oculist, he naturally adopted the test of distance to determine the legibility of single letters at the limit of vision, and he employed the oculist's special type. His conclusions cover a wide range. He decided that paper with a slightly buff tint printed with an ink tinged with blue was the most agreeable combination for the eye, though in absolute clearness nothing can surpass the contrast of black upon white. He held that leading is no advantage to clearness, and that it would be better to print the same words on the page in a larger type unleaded. He found the current type too condensed; this is particularly a fault of French type. But he favored spacing between the letters of a word, a conclusion in which he has not been followed by later investigators. He found shaded type a disadvantage and advocated a fairly black type in which all the lines are of uniform thickness. But most interesting are his conclusions regarding the letters themselves. He found that the eye in reading follows a horizontal line which cuts the words just below the tops of the short letters, the parts of the letters being indistinct in proportion as they are distant from this line. It is chiefly by their individuality on this line that letters acquire distinctness. But just here he found that an unfortunate tendency towards uniformity had been at work, flattening the rounded letters and rounding the square letters. In a series of articles he gives exhaustive studies of the various letters, their characteristics, and their possible reform.
A few years later Dr. Cattell, now a professor in Columbia, but then an investigator in Wundt's psychological laboratory in Leipsic, made a series of studies on brain and eye inertia in the recognition of letters. Like Dr. Javal he found some alphabets harder to see than others and the letters of the same alphabet different in legibility. He saw no advantage in having a mixture of capital and small letters. He condemned shading in types and opposed all ornament as an element of confusion. He regarded punctuation marks as hard to see and proposed that they should be displaced, or at least supplemented, by spaces between the words corresponding to the pause in the thought or the utterance.
He tested the letters by their legibility when seen for a small fraction of a second through a narrow slit in a falling screen. Beginning with the capitals, he found that out of two hundred and seventy trials for each letter, W was recognized two hundred and forty-one times and E only sixty-three times, the former being much more distinct and the latter much less distinct than any other. Some letters, like S and C, were found hard to recognize in themselves, and certain groups of letters, such as O, Q, G, and C, were constantly confused with one another. Said Dr. Cattell, "If I should give the probable time wasted each day through a single letter, as E, being needlessly illegible, it would seem almost incredible; and, if we could calculate the necessary strain put upon eye and brain, it would be still more appalling."
In regard to the small letters he found a like difference in legibility. Out of one hundred trials d was read correctly eighty-seven times, s only twenty-eight times. He found s, g, c, and x particularly hard to recognize by reason of their form; and certain pairs and groups were sources of confusion. The group of slim letters, i, j, l, f, t, is an instance. He suggested that a new form of l, perhaps the Greek λ, should be adopted; and he advocated the dropping of the dot from the i, as in Greek. He made experiments upon the German as well as the Roman alphabet, but he found the former so bad that he could only advise giving it up altogether.
Somewhat later, in 1888, Mr. E. C. Sanford, now president of Clark College, published in the "American Journal of Psychology" an exhaustive study on "The Relative Legibility of the Small Letters." He studied simply the letter forms, to determine the order of legibility in the alphabet and the groups most liable to confusion, in order to discover what letters most need improvement and upon what clearness depends. He too employed a special type. He found the order under the distance test to be w m q p v y j f h r d g k b x l n u a t i z o c s e, and the order under the time test m w d q v y j p k f b l i g h r x t o u a n e s c z. It will be noticed that of the seven letters most largely represented in a full font of type, e t a i n o s, all fall in the last third of one or the other of these two groups, four are there in both groups, while e, the letter used most of all, stands at the very foot of the list in the distance group. Could there be any clearer call for the reform of our letters?
