Chapter 14: Legibility and readability of Arabic fonts on Personal Digital Assistants PDAs

Electronic reading opens new avenues especially with the advance of modern reading devices. The new generation of Personal Digital Assistants PDAs is more popular and more affordable. Therefore, it is necessary to re-evaluate typefaces used in these devices as they form a substantial component in reading. In this chapter, we present a survey which has been conducted to identify Arab community preferences among some selected fonts on PDAs, to infer the popularity of using these devices for reading. The results were taken as a basis to conduct experiments in order to investigate six Arabic fonts on PDAs from the perspective of legibility and readability to come up with the best fonts. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the legibility of the selected fonts using a novel method named M-Short-Exposure method for isolated Arabic letters and connected letters. Then, another experiment for readability was also performed considering reading speed and comprehension of running texts. Thus, our findings identify the most legible and/or readable Arabic font(s) among the tested fonts. Moreover, some recommendations have been made on better use of legible and/or readable Arabic fonts for different purposes.