It's largely up to personal taste. Every font claims to be legible.
Every font claims to improve over previous fonts. Every font combines all of the
standard ascii characters and many unicode characters styled as the designer considered best, which you may agree with on some letters and not others.
Serif fonts usually have more legibility at the cost of aesthetic.
San serif fonts usually work well at more font sizes, but lack visual cues.
What is important is that it works for you, and that, if you are using it for legibility, it disambiguates 0 from O and I from l, and perhaps more importantly, remains legible and pleasant to the eye even when small or very large.
Another concern not addressed by this or most other fonts is dyslexia.
The font used on this website is simple arial on my platform, and does this well.
Arial has long since been the standard for legibility. But it is not pretty.
I personally find that the atkinson is legible enough, but in this respect is not objectively superior to simple arial or other serif fonts. as with all fonts there is compromise and it is not the most attractive font to me, as it is a sans-serif font trying to be a serif font with concern to legibility aspects only. Another legible font which pulls off the compromise possibly better is goldman sachs, although it does not have a slash through the 0 number character. It is free to use and the only provision on the font is that it not be used to suggest affiliation with or endorsement by the bank.
There are hundreds of fonts, and many open source clones of fonts. One might wish that the dyslexie font or heinemann special font were available as an open source clone. But the question of what is truly ideal for a font to be as well as how to best achieve it remains unsolved.
I also designed my own font by taking another font in OTF format and opening it in fontforge and tweaking various random elements. I didn't present it here but it was also somewhat more legible than the original font. I think a font comprised of your choice of how each letter is done stolen from across a dozen or so fonts without regard for license and then averaged would make for a pretty nice personal font. Maybe i'll look into doing that one of these days. The fact that different fonts have slightly different heights and widths for characters makes that a little bit more difficult..
This is specifically design to improve legibility for people with vision problems. It's designed by the Braille Institute who I assume know what they are doing.
The relative legibility between fonts for people with good vision is probably marginal, but can be measured with reading comprehension tests and eye tracking systems. However I suspect the difference is pretty small for most well designed fonts for most people with good vision.
Indeed. I've heard that frustration a number of times where they try to increase the font size and the layout becomes unusable. Invariably it's because the designer has tried to be way too clever.
Sans serif is more readable (at least accrding to studies) probably because of much more coarser resolution of ye olde displays (~96 dpi vs at least 200 dpi for newsprint). Nowadays, no-one currently has conducted a rigorous study to determine whether it still holds true on Hi-Res displays, and whether the active lighting of displays will be different to the passive lighting of paper.
Serif fonts usually have more legibility at the cost of aesthetic. San serif fonts usually work well at more font sizes, but lack visual cues. What is important is that it works for you, and that, if you are using it for legibility, it disambiguates 0 from O and I from l, and perhaps more importantly, remains legible and pleasant to the eye even when small or very large. Another concern not addressed by this or most other fonts is dyslexia. The font used on this website is simple arial on my platform, and does this well. Arial has long since been the standard for legibility. But it is not pretty.
I personally find that the atkinson is legible enough, but in this respect is not objectively superior to simple arial or other serif fonts. as with all fonts there is compromise and it is not the most attractive font to me, as it is a sans-serif font trying to be a serif font with concern to legibility aspects only. Another legible font which pulls off the compromise possibly better is goldman sachs, although it does not have a slash through the 0 number character. It is free to use and the only provision on the font is that it not be used to suggest affiliation with or endorsement by the bank.
There are hundreds of fonts, and many open source clones of fonts. One might wish that the dyslexie font or heinemann special font were available as an open source clone. But the question of what is truly ideal for a font to be as well as how to best achieve it remains unsolved.