Effects of Font Size and Typeface on Visual Performance and Subjective Preference for the Elderly during VDT Work

• Main Authors: Jiann-Jyh Hwang, 黃健治
• Other Authors: Tzai-Zang Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/93373283806186950123

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 工業管理學系 === 89 === Due to the invention of computers and the progress of the Internet, we must acquire much information by VDT working station now. The visual performance of VDT work was much affected by the human-computer interface. The results of other scholars’ research were completed broadly, but the research for the elderly was less by contrast. When our society is becoming older, the elderly need to study computer urgently to do so many everyday jobs. For this reason, we must do some research to help the elderly use computer easily. With the increasing of age, the situation of presbyopia is appeared after 40 years old. Visual performance also decreased slightly because of the vision and diseases. So it was not comfortable for the elderly by using VDT default setting. For this reason, this study used two experiments to investigate the effects of font size and typeface on visual identification performance and subjective preference. We hoped that our results could help the elderly improve their VDT working environment. In this research, we used the method of experiment design to gather information. Thin-ming, Zhong-yuan, Biao-kai were the three typefaces, and 25, 40, 55 visual angle (VA) in minutes were the three font size using in this study. We wanted to investigate the effects of font size and typeface on legibility and subjective preference, and discovered the difference between the elderly (65 years old or above) and the young (age from 20~28 years old). An ANOVA test was created to test the legibility and subjective preference for main effects and interactions effects. The results showed that font size significantly affected legibility. Subjects performed better with bigger font size, and 55 VA was the best. Typeface also significantly affected legibility, with Thin-ming resulting in the best performance and Biao-kai the worst. Subjective preference was significantly affected by font size. 55 VA resulted in the greatest subjective preference, while 25 VA the worst. And typeface also significantly affected subjective preference, with Zhong-yuan resulting in the best and Biao-kai the worst. When we compared the performance between the elderly and the young, it showed that the elderly usually got less performance than the young. By the performance of legibility in the first experiment, we detected that the elderly got 33% shorten in the score than the young. In the second experiment, the subjective preference of the elderly was lower than the young similarly. In summary, we recommended that 55 VA was the suitable font size for the elderly. When the font size can become bigger, the performance of the elderly can become better. The suitable typeface depended on the purposes of VDT work. When the subjects wanted to identify quickly or legibility was important, Thin-ming was the best. When readability was important or used typeface in homepage, Zhong-yuan was the best. Keywords: elderly, VDT, CRT, font size, typeface, legibility, subjective preference