Editing Research/new digital reading experiences (section)

==== On-screen readability  ====

Research on digital typography and on-screen readability provides valuable guidance for designing immersive text. For example, a [https://readymag.com/readymag/readme/tips/ Read Me! article by Readymag] highlight how factors such as eye movement, contrast, resolution, responsive layouts, and font choices influence reading comfort and comprehension on screens.

Similarly, studies on [https://www.lexend.com/ dyslexia and type design] emphasize how specific font characteristics can improve legibility for readers with diverse needs, underlining the importance of adaptable and inclusive typographic solutions in digital environments.

Very much like e-readers, the ‘immersive reading’ function, included in software such as Microsoft Word, PDF readers and Teams, allows the reader to change the column width, page background colour, line focus, and space between text according to their needs and reading style. It also allows reading text aloud, change reading speed, switch between languages and convert text.

[https://www.blinkist.com/ Blinkist] is an app that offers digital summaries of thousands of books, promising users that they can get the gist of any great book in under 15 minutes. These summaries are mostly AI generated and are available both as written text and spoken text. Unfortunately, written and spoken text are not synchronized, so they don’t work very well for Immersive reading. These summaries make the content much more approachable to a wider audience, but by design they miss a lot of the depth and nuance of the original works.

Experiments like [https://bionic-reading.com/br-apps/ Bionic Reading] demonstrate how subtle typographic interventions can guide the eye and support fluent reading. Developed by the Swiss designer Renato Casutt, Bionic Reading uses word visualization to help the brain recognize words faster. We initially recognize words by their sounds (“mama” evokes someone who cares for us) before learning to convert these sounds into written characters. Fluency in reading comes from automation, a process that is easy for some and challenging for others. Casutt’s method highlights certain letters of a word in bold, allowing the brain to fill in the rest and jump efficiently to the next set of bold letters. More information and apps can be found at Bionic Reading.

Bionic Reading works across multiple platforms, including Apple iOS and macOS, Google Android, Microsoft Windows, Google Chrome, and the web. Its interface cleans up any text and presents it in the bold-letter format. Users can adjust settings such as Fixation and Saccade (the amount of bold letters), text size, spacing, opacity, background color, and text color, with fixed presets. In the advanced paid version, readers can also select fonts from a specific collection, though the system currently works only with the Latin alphabet.

[[File:Bionic_Reading_Products_quer_02.png|300px]]

Mobile reading and fragmented text<br />
Our research focused on mobile typography, where reading increasingly happens in fragmented ways. Existing research shows that screen typography benefits from flexibility: adjustable line width, spacing, contrast, and background. As Gen Z often consumes text in fragments, combined with audio and motion, typography must remain legible while actively holding attention.

On platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, text rarely appears as continuous paragraphs. Instead, it is presented in short sequences of one to five words, revealed over time. Emphasis is created through size, colour, motion, or highlighting rather than through traditional typographic hierarchy.

(How Social media influenced fonts) https://typedrawers.com/discussion/5079/what-kind-of-impact-did-digital-social-media-have-on-fonts

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