Luciole (French for “firefly”) is a new typeface developed explicitly for visually impaired people. The result of a two-year collaboration between the Centre Technique Régional pour la Déficience Visuelle (the Regional Technical Center for Visual Impairment) and the type-design studio typographies.fr, this project received a grant from the Swiss Ceres Foundation and support from the DIPHE laboratory at the Université Lumière Lyon 2.
Word massing, spacing, the structure of the letters: the concept for Luciole adheres to a dozen specific design criteria to provide the best possible reading experience for the visually impaired. Particular care has been taken in drawing the figures, mathematical signs, and punctuation.
Each style of Luciole contains over seven hundred characters and supports almost all European languages. The character set also includes many Greek and mathematical symbols for scientific notation. Luciole aims to facilitate both optimal readability for visually impaired students and efficient deployment by publishing professionals.
The Luciole font is now used by specialized reference publishers but also by transcribers, teachers, developers.
As a result of this project, three reading tests based studies have been carried out with visually impaired students or adults:
− In the DIPHE laboratory, University Lumière Lyon 2 [study completed, published]
− In the CTRDV's ophthalmological assessment [study completed]
− As part of the ISTR's graduation project, Department of Orthoptics, University Lyon 1 [study completed]
These three studies reveal a preference of visually impaired readers in favor of Luciole.
Luciole is available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution license., which covers use (including commercial use) and distribution of the typeface for free. Simply download the fonts and move the files to the appropriate Fonts folder on your computer.
To install in MS Windows: copy the files to C:\Windows\Fonts, and then restart.
