Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi everyone, I’m interested in everyone’s thoughts and opinions on fonts preferred for those on the autism spectrum. A lot of people relay that Comic Sans is a preference. However, I don’t like comic sans. It has been used for 20 years in schools and for adults and I want to know what autistic individuals in the community think about comic sans. And explanations why it is perceived that comic sans font is preferable to let’s say arial or times Roman. I notice the Autistic Society website does not use comic sans. Which I’m glad about. Any thoughts, feeling and expressions welcome. Thanks everybody.
There may be a difference between individual personal preferences versus achieving a consensus based on ease of use and efficiency e.g. In an inclusive team where a range of people's needs are considered.
For example, I have worked in engineering teams (where neurodiversity was well represented) where we all agreed to adopt a font of Arial, in 12 point size, for our standard use in:
- emails,
- documents and
- presentations.
We realised that Calibri had become more regularly used in Microsoft Office products etc., however, we stuck to our team-choice of Arial - as that is what worked well for our cohort. This was particularly so where the language of the programme was English.
Just occasionally, we might instead opt to use Times New Roman e.g. particularly if we knew that we were planning to translate a document into other languages - as we found the rendering of multiple languages included in the same document was of more consistent / reliable formatting from a base document in Times New Roman. We found this to be so even when also inserting e.g. Chinese or Arabic script.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial
en.m.wikipedia.org/.../Times_New_Roman