Designing for Legibility Across the Lifespan

This research project investigates how typographic design supports (or hinders) reading across different age groups, with a focus on young, middle-aged, and older readers. The project addresses how age-related changes in visual, cognitive, and motor factors systematically alter reading conditions and legibility needs.

Existing research shows clear age effects: older readers read more slowly, adopt more risk-prone reading strategies, and require larger font sizes and higher luminance contrast to achieve stable reading performance. However, while these general changes are well documented, we still lack a precise understanding of how typeface style interacts with age – and how different styles may advantage or disadvantage readers at different stages of life.

In particular, the project foregrounds the historically overlooked middle-aged reader group. Positioned between “normal vision” assumptions and age-related decline, this group is rarely studied in its own right, despite undergoing gradual and functionally important perceptual changes that may already influence typographic performance.

By comparing young, middle-aged, and older readers under systematically varied conditions of differnet sizes, the project aims to disentangle which typographic features support robust reading across the lifespan, and which introduce age-specific barriers.

The outcome of the project is an evidence-based framework for age-responsive typographic design, providing designers, researchers, and educators with empirically grounded guidance for designing text that remains legible, inclusive, and effective across changing visual capacities over time.