Case Study: The Readability Consortium achieves faster, more accessible reading with UserTesting

How Adobe, Google, Readability Matters, and the University of Central Florida create breakthrough technology that improves reading for everyone

The Readability Consortium partnered with UserTesting to explore how personalized reading settings can improve readability for users. The challenge was to understand whether adjustments like font, size, and spacing could help people read more comfortably and efficiently across different abilities.

Using UserTesting, the consortium evaluated early readability concepts and found dramatic results: individualized settings increased reading rates by more than 25 words per minute on average. The insights helped support the development of Adobe’s Liquid Mode and the broader goal of creating a portable “readability token” that could bring a person’s reading preferences into software systems more seamlessly.

The Readability Consortium