Design Nomenclature / Type

Readability

How easily a reader gets through extended text — a property of the setting and the writing, not the face. Measure, leading, contrast, alignment, hierarchy and sentence construction all bear on it. A perfectly legible face at a 120-character measure with tight leading is unreadable, and the face is not the problem.

A two-column comparison headed "What you change to fix it". The left column is titled Readability and reads: a property of the setting — measure, leading, contrast, hierarchy, and the writing itself; fixed by setting the text. The right is titled Legibility and reads: a property of the typeface — aperture, x-height, distinction between I, l and 1; fixed by choosing the face.

In practice

Readability scores — Flesch, Gunning fog — measure sentence and word length and nothing else. They are proxies, not the thing; they will happily rate a well-written technical paragraph as unreadable.

Not to be confused with

How this term connects

BoumaLeadingLegibilityMeasureTypographic hierarchyReadability
Related Confused with