Indeed. I only responded because I take issue with people who say things like
> "Seriously, site makers and theme designers, please stop using $PREFERENCE everywhere as part of your aesthetic, as $PREFERENCE are really bad for extended prose."
...as if it's a universal truth when in fact people have different reading capabilities. For example I'm dyslexic and I find it much easier to read monospace text than most dynamic width type faces because letters jumble up less for me. I'm not suggesting I'm the norm but it's certainly not as clear cut as many (like the GP) make out.
It doesn’t need to be universal, merely very significant: and it is. For the average person, monospaces significantly hamper reading and comprehension of extended prose.
As for dyslexics, I can’t really comment; the main study people cite is The Effect of Font Type on Screen Readability by People with Dyslexia (Rello and Baeza-Yates, 2016) <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2897736>, but I don’t care to draw any conclusions from it because its range of fonts is surprisingly and stuntingly limited: in monospaces, it uses only the slab serif Courier (and a previous study it cites also only uses a slab serif for monospaces), whereas most monospaces used these days are sans-serif (I myself am an oddity, preferring and using Triplicate, one of very few true serif monospaces in existence); and I don’t like their choice of serifs either: CMU is known to be too thin because it’s not used as intended <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129620>, and Garamond is also known for excessive stroke weight variation (the thins being too thin, harming readability), though in both cases it’s not as great a problem on paper as on screen. But all up, I don’t think it’s fair to generalise from their data on the serif or the monospace properties, and that guts much of the paper.
I have a dyslexic sister but have never had occasion to query the (perceived) relative efficacy of monospace, and it’s a decade or more since I asked her about things like serif versus sans and I’ve forgotten what she said. I should ask her again.
> "Seriously, site makers and theme designers, please stop using $PREFERENCE everywhere as part of your aesthetic, as $PREFERENCE are really bad for extended prose."
...as if it's a universal truth when in fact people have different reading capabilities. For example I'm dyslexic and I find it much easier to read monospace text than most dynamic width type faces because letters jumble up less for me. I'm not suggesting I'm the norm but it's certainly not as clear cut as many (like the GP) make out.