I have serious suspicions that many of the complaints over the font rendering in OS X are the result of two things:
- The decreased contrast of the outlines of the
letters increase visual search time.
The longest part of the secadic eye movements that are used in the visual searches done on text is dwell duration, which is partially governed by the ease of information extraction, ``which is often influenced by stimulus quality(e.g. in target search, longer dwells on a degraded target).'' (Wickens, Gordon, & Liu, 1998).
I'm actually getting the information in the above paragraph from the textbook from my human factors course this semester. (I like it a lot. Who thought studying could be so much fun? One should follow their passions and do what they love to do. Preferably for a large sum of money, if possible.)
My point--ridiculously anti-aliased text is a ``degraded target'' and thus takes longer to perform a visual search. And this would especially suck for older adults like Doc whose visual search capability is already fairly degraded.
- The reports of increased eye strain are the result of
the brains futile and automatic attempt to compensate
for distance.
When the brain sees text with a reduced contrast and the appearance of blur, visual accomodation (the eye's lens moving to accomodate for distance) kicks in automatically. In other words, ridiculously anti-aliased font tricks the brain into thinking the font is at a different distance than it really is, and the muscles in the eye are constantly trying to adjust the lens very so slightly in the futile attempt to bring the blurry text into focus (which of course never happens). Given that some people feel okay with the extreme anti-aliasing, it might be possible that the brain eventually adapts and quits trying to bring the text into focus. It would also be fascinating to see whether screwing around with the perspective to make the ridiculously anti-aliased text appear to actually be a different distance than the rest of the screen would eliminate the eye strain. Making a menu selection look farther/nearer than it actually is would be a less than adequate solution. But it would be interesting to see if it could be done.
Some of this (mostly #2) is somewhat conjecture right now. But I suspect that if I could get my hands on an oculometer and a bunch of guinea pi...er..subjects and sit them down in front of such environments, I could easily prove both of these conditions to be true.