designing Type for Accessibility

Monday, July 1, 2024, 12:30 - 2:30pm

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Zed

Typotheque worked on a largest project up to date, developing a series of fonts to be easy to read by the widest range of readers. The project identifies and addresses situations where people are excluded from using certain technologies, and worked with digitally disadvantaged communities to support marginalised languages. For the Latin script Typotheque team carried out a series of laboratory acuity tests at the National Centre of Ophthalmology in France to determine the ideal letter proportions for their visually impaired patients, and developed fonts that benefit readers with declining vision. Zed Text is an exceptionally readable typeface that has been shown to benefit healthy readers as well as those with visual impairments such as age-related macular degeneration, loss of central vision, peripheral vision loss and blurred vision.

Peter Biľak works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design. Since 1999 he is running Typotheque type foundry.

With a background in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Héctor Mangas Afonso produces research for Typotheque, focusing on perception of type, from accessibility to acceptance.

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  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.