COR Themes for Readability from Iterative Feedback

Digital reading applications give readers the ability to customize fonts, sizes, and spacings, all of which have been shown to improve the reading experience for readers from different demographics. However, tweaking these text features can be challenging, especially given their interactions on the final look and feel of the text. Our solution is to offer readers preset combinations of font, character, word and line spacing, which we bundle together into reading themes. We identify a recommended set of reading themes through data-driven design iterations with the crowd and experts. We show that after four design iterations, we converge on a set of three COR themes (Compact, Open, and Relaxed) that meet diverse readers’ preferences, when evaluating the reading speeds, comprehension scores, and preferences of hundreds of readers with and without dyslexia, using crowdsourced experiments.