A
Postdoc
Institute of Design and Visual Interaction
Gwenllian Williams
I investigate how our eyes and minds work together to navigate the visual demands of everyday life. Trained in cognitive psychology, I use quantitative experimental methods to study this interplay and how visual design can support it. At the Centre for Visibility Design, I am examining how typography affects reading with low vision, and how individualised type can make reading easier.
Gwenllian Williams
Individualised typography & readability
THE SAME PAGE, DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES
Typography is not experienced in the same way by everyone. The letterforms, spacing, and text size that make reading easier for one person may hinder another, particularly for those who already experience difficulties with reading. Despite typography being central to everyday visual communication, many assumptions about what makes text readable remain insufficiently tested. Instead, design decisions are often based on what is believed to work for a ‘typical’ reader.
As a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Visibility Design, I combine my background in vision psychology and quantitative experimental methods with expertise from linguists and graphic designers. Together, we investigate how typography influences reading across different readers and contexts.
Today, reading increasingly takes place on adaptable digital devices rather than printed pages. This creates opportunities for typography to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and to flexibly adapt to the needs of individual readers.
My current research builds upon this opportunity as part of the Reading the Reader project, a collaboration with human-computer interaction researchers at DTU. The project aims to develop technology that uses physiological and behavioural data, such as the reader's eye movements or posture, to detect when a reader is struggling and personalise type settings accordingly in real time.
To inform this development, we first need to understand what struggling during reading looks like, and how it can be overcome with typographic changes. I investigate how different readers respond to various type settings, and which behavioural and eye movement patterns are associated with easier or more difficult reading. This research also taps into broader questions about text personalisation, such as whether an individual’s optimal typographic settings remain stable over time.
READING WITH THE PERIPHERY
Part of the Reading the Reader project focuses on groups of people who experience barriers to reading, as they can have the most to gain from personalised typography. Imagine looking directly at a word only for it to disappear into a central blind spot, forcing you to rely on the blurrier, peripheral parts of your vision to identify it. This is one of the challenges faced by people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), one of the leading causes of vision impairment.
Working with clinicians, I am investigating whether targeted typographic changes, such as wider letterforms, can improve reading performance for AMD patients by making text more legible in the periphery. We are also examining how eye movement patterns differ between individuals with and without AMD as they read differing typography, to better understand how each group processes text.
