Tipografia para crianças: um estudo de legibilidade.

Abstract

The number of articles describing tests to evaluate the influence of various typographical parameters on reading performance increased intensely from middle XX century. Among these studies, few were carried out with children learning to write and read, and the majority of them did not afford significative results. However, children s teachers of the initial years believe that typographical design may make it difficult or facilitate reading a text. Employing studies with children as references, a method was selected and adapted for the research, whose main objective was to investigate the influence of different typeface designs on the reading performance of children learning to write and read. In an initial stage, exploratory interviews were carried out with teachers and professionals involved in that process. Besides obtaining data on teaching how to write and read focusing on different typeface designs, the results from this survey helped in selecting the parameters for the reading performance test with children. Furthermore, a test of opinion and preferences was elaborated with the participant children, in order to understand their judgments concerning the different typeface designs. One hundred and forty seven students took part in this research, from two city schools and a federal school, all of them in Rio de Janeiro. The method employed consists of presenting illogical sequences of words to children. These sequences were built having in mind the verbal repertoire of the participants and were previously evaluated with 15 children. The sequences were made up with four different typeface designs, one with and one without serif, one geometrized and one specially designed for children. Besides these designs, a text was also presented to the children, which was composed only in capital letters. The evaluation criteria were reading time, total number of mistakes and number of specific mistakes. The results from the opinion tests do not indicate a correlation between liking a particular typeface design and ease in reading. The results from reading time and number of mistakes are not significantly different. However, two types of mistakes, misreading a s and o s and misreading letters in the group b, d, p, q and g, afforded significant differences, with texts composed in different typeface designs. The letters a and o were misread more frequently with designs which use the cursive a. Also, the letters b, d, p, q and g were misread more frequently with more geometric designs, which possess less details and finishings, such as serifs. The fewer number of misreadings with texts composed in designs that present more differentiation of letters, independently of the fact that these are the ones used in writing, suggests the existence of different needs along the learning of these two processes, writing and reading.