Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.
In 2005 Gareth founded the BBC’s Digital Accessibility Team. Over the course of the first 3 years, the Accessibility Team worked as an integral part of iPlayer’s core Product Team ensuring BBC iPlayer V1.0 launched as an accessible product. The team was joined the UX when the UX Design was founded in 2008.
Gareth Ford Williams
David helps drive consistent quality of visual design and branding across the BBC’s entire online output. He joined the organisation in 2014 after a 16 year career working in the more traditional world of graphic design and branding. In 2012, D&AD included David in its list of ’50 British Creative Greats’ alongside the likes of Paul Smith, Rankin and Terry Gilliam.
David Bailey
Bruno Maag is an expert typographer with over forty years of expertise in his field. He founded and led Dalton Maag Ltd, the world’s leading studio for typeface design where he worked with some of the best known brands: Amazon, Nokia, Intel, HP, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook, DHL, FedEx, ABB, BBC, Rakuten amongst many others.
Bruno Maag
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Hosted by Antonio Santos, Debra Ruh and Neil Milliken.
In 2005 Gareth founded the BBC’s Digital Accessibility Team. Over the course of the first 3 years, the Accessibility Team worked as an integral part of iPlayer’s core Product Team ensuring BBC iPlayer V1.0 launched as an accessible product. The team was joined the UX when the UX Design was founded in 2008.
Gareth Ford Williams
David helps drive consistent quality of visual design and branding across the BBC’s entire online output. He joined the organisation in 2014 after a 16 year career working in the more traditional world of graphic design and branding. In 2012, D&AD included David in its list of ’50 British Creative Greats’ alongside the likes of Paul Smith, Rankin and Terry Gilliam.
David Bailey
Bruno Maag is an expert typographer with over forty years of expertise in his field. He founded and led Dalton Maag Ltd, the world’s leading studio for typeface design where he worked with some of the best known brands: Amazon, Nokia, Intel, HP, AirBnB, Netflix, Facebook, DHL, FedEx, ABB, BBC, Rakuten amongst many others.
Bruno Maag
Follow axschat on social media
Twitter
https://twitter.com/AkwyZ
https://twitter.com/axschat
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/antoniovieirasantos/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/axschat/
Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/akwyz
Hello and welcome to AXSChat we have a Plethora of
guests today including one you might recognise from
previous episodes, welcome back to Gareth Ford Williams
who is in charge of accessibility at BBC, still after
all of this time and was our first ever guest on
AXSChat so welcome back Gareth, we have Bruno Maag, and
David Bailey joining us and today's topic is one that
I'm particularly interested in, which is around making
Fonts and typefaces accessible, so if you would care to
introduce yourselves, Gareth do you want to start have
I done you an injustice in my introduction.
GARETH: No, a good introduction, pretty much covers
everything so my title now has changed, this is the
third time on, and probably third job title but still
running the accessibility team so now head of
design/accessibility. And I'm also running
the assistive technology team in the BBC as well.
And, yeah, this is a topic that's also, I've been
massively interested in for a long time, dabbled in in
the past, and then, had the fortune of meeting Bruno
and David, and yeah now got really sucked into the
subject in a big way, about you I'll let
them explain why.
NEIL: Excellent. Bruno do you want to
tell us about your background please.
BRUNO: Yes, I am the Chairman and founder of Dalton
Maag which is type foundry based in London, we've been
going for nearly 31 years now, so, no, what I'm talking
about, no 29 years apologies, 29 years, and yeah, we
make fonts, have primarily custom fonts so some of the
work we have done is obviously with the BBC, the BBC
re:typefaces but also worked with Amazon, Netflix
Airbnb, primarily the large tech corporates but also do
smaller projects and of course with the big companies,
accessibility's always, it is one of the baseline
requirements. Obviously, I'm particularly,
if you work in a digital environment you
have to have accessibility, you have to
have typefaces that actually function within a UI
environment. And beyond that of course
because they have to be in print as well.
And about six years ago, or seven years ago, I got much
more involved and interested in in the accessibility
side of it and started getting involved in
neuroscience, my wife is a neuroscientist and together
with her, we used to have 2.00 in the morning
prosecco-fuelled conversations about typeface designs
and neuroface designs and we started realising there's
a big overlap there, so much so I did a lot of
background reading and also in particular with the
subject of dyslexia, and trying to dispel some myths
you know, and in doing so dispelling the myths
obviously upsetting a lot of people as well because
people can't cope with home truths.
And that's how I got into the whole accessibility side,
and having all that knowledge of the neuroscience now
really was in how we design as well.
We make the decisions much more consciously, you know,
rather than just intuitively, if we make a decision
about a design or letter spacing, we know why it is and
we can argue it as well. That's briefly about me.
NEIL: David.
DAVID: Hi folks, so, I'm David Bailey, UX, user
experience principal for visual design
and branding, at the BBC.
My role is to help drive consistent high-quality design
and brand experience across our entire online output.
Prior to that I was, I've been with the BBC for six
years now, prior to the role I'm in currently I was
Creative Director of our global experience language
which is our shared design framework, and accessibility
is baked into all, everything we do in all
of our output in our department.
So, I've, I was really involved in that, in evolving
that design framework for the organisation in all the
right ways. Prior to that I spent 16 years
working in commercial sector, I used to
work with a very famous design studio
called the Design Republic, who were a cutting edge
design studio in the 90s, and 2000s, and then I ran my
own studio, kiosk which did much more of the same, art
direction traditional graphic art and branding for
music industry, arts, fashion, film, TV, media all
sorts of good stuff. So, coming to the BBC,
I've been on a huge learning curving and
now I'm hybrid of brand design, specialist
as well as UX design framework thinking
design systems thinking specialist as well.
Combined into this principal role and I love t
NEIL: Excellent. So, that's great and if
people are wondering why Debra
disappeared, she's lives in rural Virginia and has the
worse internet in the cold world, she'll be back
shortly. But, so, if I go to Gareth, what
was it that prompted you to start doing
the work on developing dyslexia,
particularly dyslexia accessible fonts?
I know you've done work before the development of Reith
but, you developed this typeface and font Reith.
What was it that?
GARETH: Obviously I'm dyslexic myself and it was
something that I'd been interested in but couldn't find
a huge amount of really good conclusive hard evidence
out there. And this goes back to my time when
I was at YouView when I was on comments
for YouView for two years, part
of the team that designed and built the interface and
the hardware behind it, and one of the things we were
looking at was the UI typeface and I went out looking
for stuff and I could find a lot of claims and people
talking about it and couldn't find a huge amount of
evidence. Admittedly I didn't look deep
enough, particularly in the scientific
side, until I met Bruno, I wasn't
prompted to start looking in that area.
It was like where do you start?
I felt this was one of the foundation things that was
missing in the world of accessibility, people talk a
lot about typography or the presentation of type but
not about the typeface itself.
And there's lots of spurious claims about the comics
and claims out there but I can never find anything, it
all seemed to be anecdotal. Anecdotal is
always interesting because it makes you raise questions.
And actually, explore whether there are research
questions, but actually evidence was massively missing
so we did the best we could, when I was at YouView.
And actually, it is a question that's probably aimed at
David to start off with, because, David started, that
was really right the starting point of this whole idea
of the BBC having a single typeface and that's when the
conversation started and then you know we started
working with Dalton Maag and David can give you that
history because I just got sucked into this, because I
was never able to actual I find the answers, find the
things that I wanted when I worked at You View, we made
the best we could and made a good decision in the end.
But it always felt there was so much more than that and
so much missing in opportunity.
So, I don't know David, do you want to?
DAVID: I'm happy to he will tell but that, when I
joined the BBC for, I joined as Creative Director of
our design framework, the global experience language,
and I saw my remit was to raise the profile of that,
and make it more buy into it and belief it as our
design system that all our designers could get behind
and develop as a group. And but I was also
looking for ways for to involve its
visual styling and personality and presence, and the
corer element of any kind of brand or brand system or
digital design system is its typeface and the typefaces
that our design system was using was Helvetica, which
was a system typeface a grotesque typeface designed a
hundred years ago for print and somewhat invisible.
You could argue being invisible is a good thing for
public service organisation which has to be sort of
neutral in political opinion and et cetera,
it suits that in some respects. It is pure
information. Sorry.
NEIL: Some of our audience that are not so,
knowledgeable about typefaces can you explain the
difference between grotesque typefaces.
BRUNO: Do you want me to do that David?
DAVID: Yeah. I don't mind.
I can give the very quick version of it, and then you
could then fill in if I've got anything wrong but
briefly, broadly speaking, grotesque typeface has more
equal proportions and is more sort of, it is designed
around delivery information it doesn't have any flair
or flow. It is very much; it is just Bruno
would be better at describing it.
BRUNO: Basically, grotesque typeface is impressions
they are constructed, almost mechanical typefaces so
you would find the character widths tend to be very
even, same from one character to another.
For example, if you look at lower cases, think of the
A, B, C, the E, et cetera, you know, they're all pretty
much sit on the same width.
Also, the characters tend to look very closed in, again
if you think of the C for example, you find that the
jaws are really coming close together so that of course
creates a degree of ambiguity as well.
Grotesque typefaces are for example Earl, Helvetica,
accidents, grotesques is another one, universe is
another one, so these are the more famous ones but the
basic principle is high excite, relatively short
descender and ascender, so descender is the bit that
sticks down below, in the P or in the G. The ascender
is the bit that sticks up, like the H or the F. for
example. So, they tend to be quite short as
well that gives you quite dense impression
when you type set it and look at it in composition.
As well as opposed to that you have humanist typefaces and
we're talking about san serifs now, you have humanist
typefaces, which have more varied proportions.
And by and large the character shapes tend to be open,
again if you have if you think of the lower-case C or
upper case it has open jaws and that creates more
variety within the individual shapes as well.
Also, humanist typefaces tend to have a more relaxed
letter spacing, than grotesque which tend to be quite
tightly spaced as well. So, that's basically
the two kind of signifies between
the two main kinds of like stylistic
features of san serifs.
DAVID: I think designers graphic designers, really
like grotesque typefaces because they have a modern
flavour and that's probably borne out of the corporate
identities and science fiction films and road signage
and things people see in the world and feel like
systemy and neutral and design he is goes towards that
because it feels like a safe bet and modern nave so you
see a lot of Helvetica, you see a lot of it in the
world. And I think that we, so, that was the
typeface that Joe was using and it was
fine but we felt that, we knew there was
accessibility concerns because of the things
that Bruno just said about there being close
proportions, it is difficult for the eye to
saccadically scan the words and get through it quickly
so depending on your ability with reading or whatever,
it will, could slow you down somewhat.
That was one hook that I saw, and it had help solve
that problem, because accessibility runs through
everything the BBC does and am, I am cutting out folks,
can you still hear me.
NEIL: You did briefly but you're back now.
>>: But my selfish interest was introduce a new
typeface but accessibility if we could fix
accessibility questions and issues that would be a good
driver for me to take this to the business and say we
need this typeface not because we wanted to look new
and modern but for these reasons, and this was one of
them, accessibility, legibility readability of
typefaces on small screens or wherever
the future holds you know.
And, so there was that issue, there was also cost
saving if we introduced a new typeface and owned it we
could stop paying these licenses on all the other
typefaces we were using and bring a typographic tone of
voice to the organisation.
So, they were the three things cost saving, legibility
and distinctiveness and that's what really helped drive
this kind of through and help it to become a success
and get done. So, really, it took quite a long
time to get that across the line for me
because I needed to argue for
this, and people tried do that, my predecessors tried
to introduce typefaces in the past to the BBC and
failed so I was doggedly pursuing this because I saw an
opportunity for us. And finally it got signed off
after a lot of the wearing of the shoe leather
moving around the business and interacting
with the stakeholders and showing the
proof we need it, and that's when we put the call out
to different type design agencies, of which Bruno's
Dalton Maag was one. They responded with a
fantastic patch essentially for
the job which really demonstrated their ability at
creating really beautifully distinctive typefaces but
also their fascination and high interest in
accessibility and reading.
And so they felt like, and they've done it for large
media organisations before so we knew we were in good
hands, that was the beginning of our education, as a
design team at the BBC which is hundreds of people, we
got, we built a group of ambassadors for this project
and took them off to Bruno's studio in South London, to
begin our education, and that's where gar a me started
to learn so much and it was quite wonderful really.
So, I think that's where this started.
This is where the inception of this and now we get to
the design of a typeface which is where I think Bruno
should take over or Neil.
NEIL: I do want to jump in a little bit just before,
which was to say, obviously there were people out there
touting that they'd created accessible fonts,
particular things like Dyslexie, Read Regular,
Open Dyslexic, yeah.
GARETH: There's been quite a spate and obviously
comic sands have had this notion behind it, that you
know it is an accessible typeface, but it is always
been a problem with these things.
And to try and understand what it was because Tyrese is
another one which in broadcast font which is probably
the oldest of the accessible typefaces and you start to
look at the research, because if someone is making a
claim like this you wanted to know hard and fast
evidence that is informed design, and we couldn't find
that in those things.
There may be some good stuff within there, but it
always seemed to be that the evidence came after the
production, rather than it felt the wrong way around.
So, or it was anecdotal or in the case of Tyrese.
It was just the wrong methodology for researching type
in the first place. I mean it was a screen
typeface so they tested it on paper and
point size against the CEEFax font and Times
New Roman, it was the methodology just fell apart when
you looked at it, and when you go we can't take
anything from this claim behind Tyrese.
And we struggled to find much more than anecdote to
back anything else up.
And Dante dot is quite strong but to understand what is
going in there, I think it is with a dyslexic that's an
interesting, it is bigger typeface anyway and one of
the things if you run everything in point size and
measure one against the other and people will always
big the bigger one.
It doesn't mean, it just makes the other one larger and
they have no idea what to pick, it is just a bigger
typeface, that does not make it more readable or
legible necessarily.
There may be features and stuff in there, but we
couldn't draw that out.
So, the idea was we need to do that from scratch and
this is why, finding a partner like Bruno to work on
this, that had already, you'd already been exploring
this with Amazon, and other organisations, as well,
which your work on Bookerly, and it was to start
drawing out some of that stuff of actually no, there
is, there are things in here that are enable
performance, they enable people to read and get a flow
in reading, there is stuff around for some people it is
character recognition, for some people they need to
recognise words and for other people there's this
saccadic flow of words that Bruno needs to explain it
way better than I can.
But it was just understanding that science of reading
and the different ways people do and work back from
that, and saying OK, what does it need to do, what are
those features that support that, no to the baseline
things we need to start building from, rather than have
a hypothesis, design a font and then try and test it or
prove it afterwards.
Which is what I felt, which obviously it is what we
felt was happening in that world of accessible type.
DAVID: There is one thing I would say, another thing
to say is so there were accessible typefaces as Gareth
is saying but we would have had to license them so to
own it was the most cost effective solution but equally
it gave us the opportunity to be best in class and
create, what would the BBC do if it was to create a
typeface, well it would have to create something really
and truly best in class and that's what we
set out to do. What was lovely about the learning
process we went through from Bruno was we
have all the people in the organisation who
had no interest in typefaces whatever,
the business analyst, technical architects God knows
but we took them on this journey and they all became
incredibly nerdy quickly about typefaces, once that
happens, once you learn a thing or a two you like to
share it with your friends and calculation so they
started doing that so we quickly built this
ambassadorship with these people who poured out the
information to respective flocks so to speak and there
was this movement that started to build in the BBC
around us making a best in class typeface.
So, I didn't set out for that to happen but that's what
happened, and we capitalised on when we saw it
happening, it was a good learning for
business this was.
NEIL: Debra you have a comment.
DEBRA: I know, I've been very quiet but the reason
why I've been quiet, first of all I apologise my Wi Fi
kicked me off but rural America we need better
connectivity but I am so fascinated by this, because,
you're bringing up things that as you were saying David
people would start learning this and realise how
powerful this is, and I had no idea people like Bruno
were doing these things, but it is so fascinating, it
really is fascinating and what I would wonder is, kudos
to BBC for working with Bruno's team to figure this
out, but, and I hear all the things you're saying, but
then I also wonder, it sounds like you really have come
up with the best in type. Typeface.
So, is this something that you can help others do?
I'm not going to ask a lot of questions on this episode
because this is something, I haven't delved into
this. And but I'm fascinated with the neuroscience of it.
And just to somebody as I've gotten older I struggle
to, I have a problem, I'm on the computer all day long,
but, I don't read any more, what I do is either have
Alexa read kindle to me or I do, I have, I let them
read it to me, and I absorb the information better
because I recently was diagnosed with dyslexia, already
have ADHD, and I'm thinking those two things are
palming together. And I'm fascinated I
have a daughter with Down's syndrome
and my sadly my husband, his dementia
increased his reading ability really was impacted so,
this impact so many people, but I don't hear anybody
talking about this. So, I just want to say I'm
fascinated and curious at some point would
it make sense in the conversation to
how can everybody else learn from what BBC is doing?
I know that's why we're here and I will go on mute.
BRUNO: Yeah. I'd like to jump in on that.
First, I'd like, to encourage you to start reading more
again, because, reading like everything, playing an
instrument is something that you get better at with
practice. You know.
DEBRA: I just have something that's called dry eye,
so my eyes burn all the time.
BRUNO: Obviously I do appreciate you know like
people have a variety of afflictions or deficiencies
and so on and so forth, I appreciate that.
But I think first and foremost we need to understand we
are not born with the ability to read.
We are not born with that, we have to learn it, and we
have to practice it.
There's a tiny little bit in your brain, in the vast
majority of the world's population is on your left
hemisphere just behind the top part of your ear and it
is the size of the top of your fingertip and called the
visual word form area, in there, every single character
of any language, irrespective of writing system is
being decoded, but you have to train that part of the
brain, you have to train the neurons to recognise the
shapes that it is presented with.
So, it can decode them correctly. Right.
DEBRA: So, Bruno, so, and I totally interrupted you
I apologise because I could sit at your feet and listen
to for weeks on end because you're so brilliant.
But, are you saying because I've never thought it from
this perspective, are you saying, because I do work all
day long, I do PowerPoint presentations, but do you
also to make sure you don't lose that muscle we still,
even if it is that's fascinating, OK I'm with you.
I'm learning. Thank you.
BRUNO: You see, in order to understand reading you
need to understand neuroscience, and the brain is
always at full capacity, right.
Every single bit, every single neuron in your brain is
used, not always at the same time, but every single
neuron has a specific function.
This whole thing of people saying oh we only
use 10% of our brain is complete and utter rubbish,
our brain is used 100% you know for different things.
If it were doing a 100% at full speed all the time
simultaneously, within three days you would be dead of
exhaust because the brain would use up so many calories
and energy you wouldn't eat that much it is impossible
you know. But anyways, so, and the brain has
to do so much, so, that there is a concept in
neuroscience called neurological recycling.
So, that basically the brain takes neurons that are
lying dormant not being used and takes them and uses it
for something else. For a new skill say for example.
And once that's gone it is gone. You know.
It is really, really hard to then grab those neurons
back and reutilise them for what you have done
previously. The same goes with visual word form area.
First of all the less you read the less you train, the
less that area is able to efficiently and quickly and
correctly identify and decode the shapes of letters and
the more the brain will be tempted to start doing mural
recycling because you're not using it, so therefore,
hey, I'm going to take that you know.
You're not making use of it; I will take it your loss
not my problem you know.
So, you got to do that, so, that particular part now of
course with the whole reading you then also have to
seminar series man particular area which sits at the
front, near the frontal lobe where meaning is attached
to letters and letter shapes and words et cetera, and
in the reading process is also involved de phonological
area which is on the left hemisphere, which sits in
your primary auditory cortex, very close to the visual
word form area where sound is attached to a visual
shape in order to correctly eventually identify what
the written word means you know because that's a little
bit dependent on language.
So certain languages are opaque, other languages are
transparent, English is a very opaque language which
basically sounds like it is spells and not is written
at which makes it harder for dyslexics and so on but
that's like another three hour episode of AXSChat.
So, but that's just neural recycling and I hijacked the
whole conversation.
About your brain and that's extremely important to
understand as well.
Yes, obviously you can have deficiency in your eyes, by
of course affects what is being sent back into your
visual cortex and eventually into visual word form area
and if you have a blurred image of a character the
visual word form area has more difficulty to correct
live identify what the shape is, and therefore your
reading speed goes down, legibility goes down and so et
cetera, et cetera, and if the reading speed and the
reading flow is interrupted and affected then of course
your comprehension is going to be affected as well so
it has a huge amount of repercussions, so, now, we are
going outside of the eyes, and we are going into the
actual character shapes, so, the more ambiguous
character shapes and complex the character shapes the
harder it is for the visual word form area to correctly
identify what the letter shapes are.
Right. So, this is why for example, something
like Helvetica, typeface is probably or is
less legible than the humanist typeface
because a grotesque typeface has far
more ambiguity so your brain has to do much more work
to correctly and quickly decode the letter shapes.
So, now, I'm exhausted.
NEIL: That's OK, all we need to feed you obviously.
DEBRA: Wow. wow
GARETH: That is still only scratching the surface,
believe me. We've been talking over three
years and still unpicking some of this stuff.
And then you get into:
DEBRA: It is very important.
GARETH: Which is why we have got soon
VERITY: A Sans serif with the Sans version it is
really good for individual character recognition and
the Serif I font is really good for Word because Serif
pull the word together as a shape, so if you are a
person who really needs whole words, and to get that
flow through, that's right isn't it Bruno the Serif are
an aid of readability.
BRUNO: Aid because they disambiguate shapes even
more, say for example if you have a mirror characters
like a B and D, or P and Q, you know with the Serifs
you can create extra visual cues as to what shape it is
DEBRA: I like that, the seven or the 1.
BRUNO: Exactly. That also brings me ..
Go on.
DAVID: We built those characteristics into
the as a feature.
BRUNO: Exactly say for example the P and the Q for
example, the Q hasn't got a spur at the top where the
curve goes into the straight, quite often you find
there's a little spur particular sticking out.
The Q in BBC Right goes like curves in, at an angle.
And then you have the P, but the P does have a spur so
again that's a differentiation between two shapes and
that's a clue as to how your brain ought to come like
decode the characters.
GARETH: It is giving your brain cues and help for
this. when he started unpacking this, the
arguments get sway oversimplified.
There was a poll I saw recently that said serif and
versus sans serif There's hundreds of each one and so
many different clarifications and the features and you
can't unpick them and say is one features better, it is
a holistic approach. And each one of those has a job to do.
And you know, it is and there are so many features as
well when you start, there are some very generalstic
ones which we touched on.
NEIL: I'm interested in that, you can talk about
serif versus sans serif but weightier font also has a
significant impact on legibility, for example, we
talked about Helvetica before, well when Apple from
Helvetica to Helvetica new they made it much more
skinny, and for me that was a real problem because then
I suddenly found it much harder to read anything on my
iPhone. So, it's not, you know it is not that, there were
skills to response but harder for me to read because it
became ...
BRUNO: Absolutely. Let's face it, there is a reason why a regular
typeface, or what you would call a regular, why the
stems in the vertical strokes, and by and large a
little bit thinner the horizontal strokes, why they
have a certain weight. This has been tried
and tested for the last 500 years,
or 550 years since Gutenberg invented the printing with
movable type, it hasn't changed there's a reason for
it, so no point for digital designers in newer
environment so start going thin, when a large part of
the audience tends to be over 40, whose eyesight is
going to pots basically. And that is a
natural deterioration of our eyesight,
old people see less, and that's a fact.
You know. So, therefore, you have to
tell those 20 year old kids with 2020 vision,
to actually start thinking about people like a
50 year old in mind like myself you know.
But anyway. One of the things also going
quickly back to the neuroscience as well of
course short term memory plays
a very important role as well in the processing.
And it has been shown that people who have short term
memory afflictions, find it much harder to read as
well. So, it's come like the quick process that I illustrate
is very, very simplified processes are extremely
complex in the brain.
You have short term memory involved, visual work form
area semantic phonological area involved, on top of
that you have the entire motor cortex involved which
obviously controls your eye movement so you can do
saccadic movements across the line so basically the
brain controlling your eyes to know what you're looking
at. You have the visual cortex involved.
You have the auditory cortex involved.
There are two areas called, I always confuse them -
Wernicke and Broca, one is language input the other is
language output. You know, so, it is continuous
feedback loop when you read and particularly
when you start reading out loud.
It is continuous feedback loop, that basically is so
complex that it is really, really hard to describe it.
You know because everything is involved, literally
everything. And then of course you have numbers,
numbers is a completely different matter
because numbers don't get processed in
individual word form area they get
processed in the visual number form area exactly the
opposite way in your arithmetic hemisphere the left hand
side is linguistic functions right hand side is
primarily arithmetic functions.
And then there's the cross informational thing between
the two hemispheres that eventually brings it all
together. OK. Someone else talk I'm running out of ...
DEBRA: Amazing, wow.
NEIL: We're also, you know, buffering up on the edge
of our time but this is such a fascinating topic, that
I think that people will be happy for us to run over.
I think that, the other thing I just wanted to touch on
before we close, was we've also not touched upon the
sort of the desire to produce something that looks nice
and the desire for something that is aesthetically
pleasing because one of the objections that I have to
some of the authorities previous accessible font is
that they were ugly.
And, that they were aesthetically displeasing to me to
the point that I found it was off putting reading.
So, I mean, how much.
DEBRA: Is it ugly, or is it going back to the
science that Bruno is saying, maybe your brain is
saying, it is ugly because of:
NEIL: They deliberately unbalanced they would design
to be unbalanced so you could discern the letters from
different, but I guess when we think of beauty we think
of symmetry and balance.
GARETH: It is also appropriateness.
NEIL: Definitely there's a thing about
appropriateness.
GARETH: So, the famous one of when the scientists at
Serne announced the Hex basin and they did their
PowerPoint in Comic Sans and there were more tweets on
the day about the typeface instead of the greatest
discovery of our age. You know, because
they made the whole thing like a nursery
newsletter and that was inappropriate.
BRUNO: Yeah. I mean, the stuff is going
as far as back as 1927 by
Berger and Franklin who were two psychologists
and they looked into the look and feel of typefaces,
and they did a whole study and they compared different
stylistic expressions of typefaces, the look and feel
and had people match them to certain industries and
primarily within an advertising context and they found
that the vast majority of people irrespective whether
male or female would place certain typefaces in certain
categories. Pretty much unfailingly.
And so, clearly, we associate culturally, or maybe
because of shape et cetera, et cetera, culturally or
maybe natively, we associate certain shapes and certain
types of letter forms with certain industries and
certain types of information and communication Yeah.
DAVID: So, bringing back to Ref, since the typeface
had representation of the BBC's tone of voice it had to
have a variety of styles and weights to echo something
with the different content we're publishing but equally
of a reflection of society as well.
There had to be different kinds of tones of voice or
accents so to speak in graphic representation so that's
why we developed quite a large font family for BBC Ref,
but what you were saying before about it actually
looking nice, and feeling like the right thing, the
right type of face or being desirable.
One of the things that we've talked a lot between garth
me and Bruno is about the three pillars of
accessibility so there's technical, is it built
correctly?
Is it functional, does it work?
And emotional, emotional accessibility does it appeal?
Yes, and I think if you don't have that initially then
they're not going to care if it works or functions
because we won't look at it so that's a huge part of
accessibility as well.
BRUNO: And I think it is also important to see those
three points emotional function and technical, as a
holistic triangle. None can work in isolation.
They always harmonise together.
And if you get the sweet spot then you have the most
optimal typeface. I'm not saying the perfect
but the most optimal because perfection doesn't exist.
GARETH: I always remember my days back, and talking
to a group of teenagers and talking about assistive
tech and some of them had a lot of stuff attached to
their chairs, PTs, and various input devices and
technologies, and I remember the general mood was a lot
of them really hated them because they made them,
they're teenagers, they're self conscious, going
through what every teenager does they want cool stuff
and yet it looks like it was designed by Fisher Price
and absolutely hated their kit and wanted something
that looked cool and sophisticated and functional and
so it failed to, it reflected something themselves in
the way they wanted to feel about themselves and have
something that it was out of a book for a five year old
for 17 year old is humiliating.
NEIL: Yeah.
GARETH: So we have to have that connection, and we
have to feel comfortable and as Neil said some of the
typefaces they look like they've come from Scooby do,
or, out of the goodies, that's a UK references, Debra
you wouldn't get. So, it is that they're just they just don't look,
they're wrong and out of place, and then it becomes
difficult. There may be some good stuff in there, but.
NEIL: It is incongruous. It feels congruous,
we definitely run over now so I do
need to thank MyClearText who is keeping outside
captioned, Barclays Access for keeping and supporting
us over the years and Microlink also, so, it only
remains to thank Bruno David and Gareth for what has
been a fascinating chat today.
I'm really looking forward to the conversations on
Twitter on Tuesday thank you very much.
DEBRA: Thank you BBC for continuing to really raise
the bar for everybody. I am I ask all the
time in the US who is the best, and they say BBC.
I tell people that all the time and obviously, because
you are working with people like Bruno so applause.
Applause.
GARETH: Thank you so much.
Thank you.
DAVID: Thanks folks