A
Research Assistant
Institute of Design and Visual Interaction
Jakobine Jessen
I am drawn to the places where language meets the everyday – the text on a street sign, the phrasing of a survey question, the typeface in a news article. My background is in sociolinguistics, with a particular interest in how language marks its place in the world. To me, typography is a medium through which language does that: the visible shape language takes when it reaches a reader.
Jakobine Jessen
The work and the Research
Between Clinic and Classroom
As a research assistant in the Centre of Visibility Design, I move between projects to assist my colleagues. Some weeks you find me in an eye-clinic collecting eye-tracking data from AMD patients, others in a classroom testing letter recognition in dyslexic children, and finally you can find me in the office briefing experiment designs, verifying results, line-editing a colleague’s manuscript, or working on my own study. With experience in collaborating with participant who require patience and clarity – and being one if the only Danish speakers on the team – carry out the testing of and communication with the participants, schools, doctors, and others involved.
In both the Reading the Reader and the ScreenReads project, I work as the experimenter in close collaboration with the researchers.
Weight and Contrast
Within Reading the Reader, I study font weight and background colour. Boldness in fonts does not equal legibility but clinical practice has long assumed that bolder print helps people with impaired vision read faster, and plenty of low-vision aids are built on that assumption. However, in a study of people with central vision loss, fonts bolder than the standard produced no reading-speed advantage at all, challenging the very advice it was meant to support.
Related work suggests why: weight rarely acts alone, and how much a bolder stroke helps depends on how large the letters already appear to the reader's eye, among other things.
It is in the literature that reading speed holds near its maximum across a wide range of contrasts and only collapses once contrast drops below a fairly low threshold. My study sets font weight and background colour side by side and asks not whether either variable helps in isolation, but how the two interact and what that combination means for the readers.