It doesn’t need to be universal, merely very significant: and it is. For the average person, monospaces significantly hamper reading and comprehension of extend

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 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 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.