1, l , I, 0 and 0 

 A Call to Devs to Avoid Look-alike Characters in Account Numbers

l 1 I O 0

Can you tell these apart?

Could you tell them apart if they weren't next to another alternative?

The above is a lower case L, a numeral one, an uppercase i, an O as in Ostrich, and a zero.

And that's just in the typeface LinkedIn uses on my Windows system. As I would guess all of us know, this issue shows up in many fonts. In some fonts, the lower case L and the numeral one look identical, so then you have 3 identical looking items. In other fonts, mostly serif fonts, they look different and it's easy to see the difference.

So suppose you are trying to access an account, and you have to punch in the numbers on your phone. Depending on the account number, you might have several numbers that are simply guess work. Or you are calling about an account and you have to read it off to the person on the other side of the phone. So much time can be wasted. Has this happened to you?

So my question is two fold:

Coders--you may have never realized this is an issue, because IDE's use serif fonts such as Courier, so you probably don't see the issue when you are testing. But that's WHY they use serif fonts.

So, what would the impact be to redesign a system that skips these numerals and characters in account numbers? How would the algorithm work? I realize it would reduce the options of numbers in the universe of account numbers. But how big of an issue would this be?

UX Designers / UX Texters: Can you advocate to use typefaces for numerals and letters that make them very easy to interpret? Have you ever had this discussion with team members, and how did it go? Is it difficult to find fonts that have the look and feel you want but also clearly differentiate?

Google and other platform/OS interface designers: Bring up a search bar or other input screen. Type the 5 characters/numerals above and tell me if you can tell the difference. Do you think this matters?

Thoughts? Strategies?