MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is a story about a font, the style of a text that appears on a printed page or digital screen. The State Department's official font is the latest front in the Trump administration's war on diversity and inclusion efforts. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken ordered official documents to be printed in Calibri. It's considered more reader-friendly. But according to Reuters and others, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the department's switch to this font was a wasteful diversity move. And Rubio has ordered a return to Times New Roman, which he said would, quote, "restore decorum and professionalism to the department's written work," unquote. For more on this, we've called Professor Kristen Shinohara. She leads the Center for Accessibility and Inclusion Research Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Good morning, Professor. Thanks so much for joining us.
KRISTEN SHINOHARA: Good morning. Thank you so much for having me.
MARTIN: What is the difference between Calibri and Times New Roman?
SHINOHARA: Yeah. The main difference is the serif, which is the little flourish that's at the end of the text that can help you to tell the difference between letters like a capital I versus a lowercase L. Times New Roman has that serif and Calibri doesn't. This is the broader general differences between the two.
MARTIN: And so why do people say that Calibri is more accessible? Like, what makes a font more accessible?
SHINOHARA: Sure. Accessibility of a font really depends on legibility. So how can you tell the difference between those letters and how readable it is. So how generally it is easy to read it. It also includes things like font size, color, spacing between letters and lines. And this matters because it impacts the ability for people to be able to read and understand texts. This impact can be more severe for people with learning or reading disabilities like dyslexia or for people with low vision.
MARTIN: So when deciding on a font type for a professional setting like, you know, the Department of State, are there certain criteria that are used to choose one font type over another?
SHINOHARA: Generally, it's going to be those characteristics that I talked about, like font size and color and also spacing. So there are different things that people are considering about whether or not a text is easier to read or not and how much it might lend itself towards being or making that content more accessible to a general reading audience.
MARTIN: So as we said that this decision by the Trump administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reverses the change made by the former secretary of state. You know, that move in 2023 - I was looking this up - made headlines. Like, there was a whole - there were whole stories about people grumbling about it. Why do you think people get so worked up about a font?
SHINOHARA: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of personal attachment to certain kinds of fonts that people might use. But when we're thinking about changing fonts for accessibility, the broader goal is to make these technologies and user interfaces easier to use. And so switching might feel a little bit jarring, but ultimately, it's going to focus on making these more accessible for people with disabilities and for people to use in different contexts.
MARTIN: And do you have an opinion about this? Do you have a personal opinion about this?
SHINOHARA: I don't know if I have a personal opinion about fonts specifically. But I do think that generally, in my field, accessibility focuses towards making these things more usable for people with disabilities, with the additional benefit of other people without disabilities also finding things easier to read. So not following these recommendations can really make content difficult to understand for many people, and this ultimately risks excluding more people from accessing information.
MARTIN: That is Kristen Shinohara. She's a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Professor Shinohara, thanks so much for sharing these insights with us.
SHINOHARA: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF LUDLOW'S "TIME NEW ROMAN (FULL BAND VERSION)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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