Legibility evaluation of the safety and health information used in pesticides

Safety and health related information for the proper use and handling of pesticides is usually printed on the surface of the pesticide products (bottle type or bag type) in the form of texts. But, the guidelines or standards for the appropriate presentation of the texts for the pesticide products are most vague or not practical. Thus, this study aimed to provide the preliminary guidelines for the text sizes based on the legibility experiments. Total twenty subjects from two age groups (young: n=10, old: n=10, five males and five females in each group) participated in the experiment. First, subjects read the text cards presented in the distance of 50cm from the eyes of the subjects. Eight different text card sets were prepared for different font type(thick gothic-type and fine gothic-type), thickness of font(plain and bold), and number of syllables (2 and 3 syllables). When subjects read the cards, the correctness of reading (correct or wrong) was recorded and the degree of discomfort (from 1: no discomfort at all to 4: can't read at all) was also evaluated for all the text sizes. Results showed that the character size should be 4 pt or larger for the young subjects to read at least one word correctly in all the text conditions. For the old subjects to read at least one word correctly, the character size should be five pt or larder. The average of the minimum character sizes for 100% correct answer is 6.1 pt for young subjects and 10.5 pt for old subjects, respectively.

농약 표시 글자 크기 가이드라인 설정을 위한 가독성 평가