Font in an online setting can be a personal preference issue, as some prefer and always use Times New Roman, some Comic Sans, and some Tahoma. Font size and color can make the issue more complicated, though this is all very small in the scheme of things. Petty as it seems, font can cause issues among readers. There is a growing trend among some web service providers to limit the choice for users. WordPress, for instance, is limiting the choice of fonts once you start to use a template in case some web designers become too creative for their own good. There are a number of reasons for effort to reduce choices:
- Browser compatibility: Browser environments are getting more complicated. One font that displays well on Safari may not display very well on Firefox. One person’s favorite font may be another user’s nightmare.
- ADA Compliance. Generally Sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Tahoma and Verdanna (fonts without the extra cross strokes, loops, tails etc) are easier to read for someone with magnifiers or screen-reading softwares, hence the use of Arial as a default font for Blackboard;
- Reader Differences: Readers have different preferences in the choice of typeface and sizes too. Some may react negatively to certain choices that deviate too far from what they perceive as norms of a particular organization. It is therefore not most desirable to use types and sizes of font that tend to “jump” at you.
- Usability: Some fonts, such as Verdanna, are known to be more legible even in small sizes. Serif fonts are usually more difficult to read when scaled up or down.
Here are a few additional font tricks to annoy your students/readers, and I am going to demonstrate it myself in every case:
- USE ALL UPPER CASE, WHICH IS EQUIVALENT TO YELLING;
- Overdo your emphasis by using italics, boldface, and underscore simultaneously and sometimes multiple exclamation marks !!!!!!
- Make your font look like a Christmas tree by using multiple colors.
- Change your font constantly and become inconsistent with the scheme you start with.
Blackboard now gives a limited number of fonts to choose from: Arial, Arial Black, Book Antiqua, Century Gothic, Comic Sans, Courier New, Garamond, Georgia, Tahoma, Times New Roman and Verdanna. And the default font is Arial in size 3. I would encourage you to use this default unless there are special reasons to overwrite it. Windows users can zoom in by pressing CTRL +, or CTRL – to zoom out, and CTRL 0 to zoom back to the default font size. Mac users can do the same, but instead of the CTRL key, they can use the “Command” key and “+/-” to zoom in or out. Here some suggestions for you to reduce possible problems that may be caused by font choices:
- Use the HTML toggle tool: When you copy content directly to Blackboard text editor, look for the HTML toggle tool (“< >”), click on that, and paste it in this HTML mode, which will get rid of all the formatting you have in your Word Processing software, as well as span codes that may cause issues for student submissions of assignments or tests. You can then format it using Blackboard’s own text editor. I have heard that future releases of Blackboard will have tools to clean MS Word codes automatically, which would be even better.
- Use attachment: For longer documents you do not want to re-format, use “file” to attach it as a document.
- Clean Word codes for tests: MS Word codes in texts for assessments are known to cause problems for tests and sometimes assignments, make sure you use clean text when you copy them while creating tests, or use Respondus, which can clean the codes. Do not worry about the font size, as students can zoom in or out themselves as described above. Lockdown Browser also allow the option to zoom in or out now if Lockdown Browser is enabled for your tests.
Some font choices are meant to make your pages easier to read. Fonts like Times New Roman, for instance, may work best for print media, but it is not the best choice for the web. That being said, I am wondering what the phrase “web-friendly fonts” will do to readers of this blog, hopefully not like the statement “that all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end” in Gulliver’s Travels, in which people disagree so much that rebels flew Lilliput to defend their rights to break the eggs a certain way. Maybe you can laugh it off as Jim Dvorak does. Seeing how much I care about Verdanna, he sent me email messages using Wingdings and then Cardo (for Greek) to get me all riled up.