Some more links...

[conuly]

One on those gendered "survival guides" printed by Scholastic
One on how word spacing might affect how well dyslexics can read
One on pre-game prayers that I want to keep track of for the purposes of comments to internet articles

Comments

[codeman38]

The spacing thing... I'd never thought about it, but that's totally one of the reasons for why I find some fonts to be so much easier to read than others. The minimum width of a space differs on a per-font basis!

[conuly]

And now you know exactly what it is :)

[codeman38]

One thing that bugs me, that I'd like to see further research on... I found the original article for this research (full-text version is free), and as far as I can tell, they didn't control for letter spacing vs. word spacing vs. line spacing, but simply increased all three proportionally.

For me, the spacing between letters isn't as significant as that between words and lines. I've found that I particularly have processing issues when line spacing is tight, where I'll skip lines or combine two adjacent lines together. Spacing between words is also a problem; there've been a few books I've tried to read where the spacing was so bad that words all sort of rantogetherlikethis. Inter-letter spacing is actually the least problematic for me, unless it's really tightly kerned.

[mc776]

Okay that book thing is just depressing... especially when I saw the covers and thought it was just some executive meddling with what would otherwise be nearly identical books.

Gonna keep the spacing thing in mind though... are there any pictures so I can see what kind of spacing is meant?

[mayna.livejournal.com]

I saw about those survival guides on Facebook... how they got published, we'll never know. Surely someone should've said "hmmm maybe being this gender-biased isn't such a good idea in this day and age..."

[conuly]

The gender bias towards kids is getting worse, isn't it? I swear it wasn't this bad when I was a kid.