The wide (and growing, which is great) variety of fonts designed to be easily readable are so interesting to me because they all start with similar aims, use different metrics, and come up with wildly varying font designs.

Take Kermit, Inter, OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Bookerly, and my personal favourite Lexend. They are all expertly designed, do great work at improving readability and legibility, though have very different target readers. Some look hand-drawn/modern/geometric, are bold/thin, single/double storey a, I with/without crossbars, t/l/q/y with/without flick, 3 with/without flat top, are slanted/upright by default, or have `font-variation-settings` to control all of the aforementioned.

Searching "easily readable fonts" brings up even more choice, some of which seem awesome and I'll have to look into. It's a shame that good scientific evidence on font readability/legibility is so difficult to find, as at best there's a case study showing that the font is beneficial to a small, select group of readers, and at worst (Sans Forgetica-style) it's the same but there's a follow-up study a few years later showing that the improvements are negligible or nonexistent.

I've looked into the state of research on font legibility many times over the years, and this time I came across this thorough thesis from one Dr Liz Broadbent[0] (who sadly passed away recently).

It includes a great rundown of all the studies that have been done regarding font legibility and dyslexia. I remain completely unconvinced that any of these fonts offer a measurable improvement in readability over, say, Arial.

A big problem I see again and again is that the sizes compared are not fair - the author notes that spacing likely has a large effect on results and that different studies have tried to account for this in different ways. In her own study the author compares 16pt Arial with 15pt OpenDyslexic in an attempt to match the x-height. But in terms of how much space on a page a given text takes up, 15pt OpenDyslexic is actually equivalent to 25pt Arial! On page 154, a study participant even points out that it's clearer to read because it's bigger.

But overall I'm just glad funding is being directed to serious research on this topic.

[0] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173561/2/L.Broadbent...