Just off the top of my head the "v" in there doesn't have a point on the bottom, which is one of the confusions my daughter has ("u" vs "v"). And I don't think the "n" needs the serif on the right foot, as that's not the "platonic" shape of a lower case N. I do appreciate that their lower case "a" is more like a handwritten one, as is the lower case "g".

I've been going through the Teach Your Child to Read[0] book, and it introduces a "learner-friendly" font, which actually helps. It has special glyphs for "th", for example, and other font tricks like making silent letters smaller, and different variants for the vowels depending on their sound. Eventually, those tricks are minimized and the kid is reading a normal font, though.

In other words, I'm interested in the idea of a font that's useful for early readers, but this font doesn't seem to be concretely designed in that way, and I'm put off by the vague "friendly" type stuff it seems to be focusing on.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671...

As a dyslexic software engineer who knows by heart a good number of the 50 tables in the open font type specification, I'd like to look into this in more detail but there is no code or paper published about this (yet).

In the mean time, it would be nice for people stop using dyslexics as an excuse to motivate for their own special interests. I've suffered my entire formative years under this low-key Munchausen by proxy from all sort of educators gass-lighting me into believing I should use some technology that in the fullness of time proved to be counter productive.

But ok, the variable speed HOI animation looks cool, I'll give you that.

Edit: I'm poking at this and it seems like the only way to do the animation is via the font designer's library. I'll be a lot more excited when this is supported by more options.

I read a lot of books on my ereader and generally find the best comfort comes from bold text and some kind of serifs. I really blaze through my books though, so I don't know if that actually improves my comprehension or just makes it feel better to skim.

https://tug.org/pubs/annals-18-19/euler-summary.pdf

Another consideration which I'm surprised wasn't made use of is that letter recognition is overwhelmingly focused on the upper half of letters --- ages ago, there was a typeface developed which took advantage of that, providing variants of letters where the lower halves were modified so as to indicate how a particular letter used in a particular word was pronounced, so that the "c" in "cat" had a different lower portion from the "c" in "cent".

That said, I'd really like it if they would publish the software used to make this font, ideally as opensource --- I have a type design project which stalled against the need to create variants for each size, working from an incompleat set of letterforms at each size (the only letters available in the compleat size range from the sample I had were "n" and "N", go figure) --- I believe this would let me finish up all the sizes of the design.

I did a super-brief search on the page but "download" didn't turn up any results. Does anyone else know where we can download this from?

But that might've also been the weird scrolling behavior of the page that ruined it for me.

I would have preferred a double-storey a instead of single-storey ɑ. I find it more readable and easier to distinguish against a o.

Though I can understand the need to be similar to handwriting. I'm guessing they had a long debate to decide between a and ɑ.

Regardless of the claimed merits of this font (I'm not dyslectic and this font just strains my eyes), I hold the opinion that any effort like this by a megacorp like Microsoft should be approached by them from a charitable angle. If this font isn't permissively licenced (I.e., Microsoft bought it and liberated it from creator Underware) and is just an Office exclusive, it is pointless, and possibly harmless (like that font which OpenDyslexic is based on).

Take Kermit, Inter, OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Bookerly, and my personal favourite Lexend. They are all expertly designed, do great work at improving readability and legibility, though have very different target readers. Some look hand-drawn/modern/geometric, are bold/thin, single/double storey a, I with/without crossbars, t/l/q/y with/without flick, 3 with/without flat top, are slanted/upright by default, or have `font-variation-settings` to control all of the aforementioned.

Searching "easily readable fonts" brings up even more choice, some of which seem awesome and I'll have to look into. It's a shame that good scientific evidence on font readability/legibility is so difficult to find, as at best there's a case study showing that the font is beneficial to a small, select group of readers, and at worst (Sans Forgetica-style) it's the same but there's a follow-up study a few years later showing that the improvements are negligible or nonexistent.

I cross the t's going the opposite way that this font recommends, and I write some numbers (like 4 and 7) with some strokes going the "wrong" way.

Most of the world (writing included) isn't designed for lefties. But sometimes doing things the "wrong" way works better when you're in the minority. I'm not sure if this font helps or hurts.

Is the company itself made to appeal to kids

giggles

You don't get away with just slapping out a statement like that unless you provide a scientific paper to back up your work.

Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives. Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar role in our culture.

In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.

Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears exceptionally sloppy as a result.

Kermit will not survive.

Most of the arguments seem to be biased by "what an adult think is playful and fun", while my kid has a very different view of things.

Things like lower vs upper case are a struggle for him, it basically forces him to remember twice as many letters. Also the handwriting style just makes letters harder to recognize, especially for n and r, u and v, etc.

It’s like I’m wearing my prism lenses. I wonder if a less cartoony font could capture these qualities.

It would be really neat to have automatic transcription that could annotate the result accordingly.

That is a really interesting use for LLMs I would never have even considered. The example video with JFK's speech is pretty compelling.

https://kermit-font.com

Any claims of pedagogical helpfulness should be made very cautiously though, before there are multiple independent studies of that.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/mczee

This was my go-to many years ago!

It's going to be included with MSWord, sure, but what if I want to use it as a webfont?

Underlines with letters that go down (g, y, j, p, q ) don't keep the underline continuous.

Kerning on the emdash (—) is a little too tight

This is why I only use Google fonts. They're all permissively licensed so I don't have to worry about anything.

The font is cool, I have no gripes with it. The things I can't stand is the absolute corporate BS coated with a heavy layer of weak "science" and "empowering kids".

If the work is good, just let it do the talking. No need for waterboarding us with waves of corporate slop.

Again, the font is fine. Congratulations to the people who worked on it.

Talk about being a bit over-clever with your design...

[0] https://kermit-font.com/