The areas that I am aware of, which cause problems are; size, full justification, large serifs, end of line hyphenation, paper colour & letter spacing. With the advent of desk top publishing, computer generated articles have become increasingly hard to read, because people have become far more focused on things looking ‘nice’ rather than being easily readable. Most people loose their way on the page sometimes.
If articles are fully justified ( both margins are straight ) then they are hard to read because when you loose your place on the page, you have not been able to memorise the pattern of the right margin, to work out where the next line starts. Instead, everyone has to remember the pattern of the words on the surrounding lines, which is far more difficult. Also, words are compressed & expanded when full justification is used and this makes it far easier to lose the pattern of the words in your mind.
Remedy: Text aligned to the left-hand margin, as I have done with most of this page is far easier to read, because the brain can often remember the irregular pattern made down the right-hand margin and use the pattern to find where you were on the page, when you get lost.
When reading a long line of small text ( < 12 point ) people can find that they are unable to trace where the next line starts.
Remedy: Put text in columns if you are printing using small text, especially if you are using paper wider than 1/3 A4 ( 100mm ).
Your ‘word’ disappears and becomes a pile of odd letters, with lots of the word missing. This is what happens to me when ‘end of line hyphenation’ is used. I only remember some of the letters from the start of the word and cannot find the rest of the word on the next line, because I am looking for a pile of letters that I don’t recognise, instead of the ‘form’ or ‘pattern’ of a word. Therefore, I loose my place on the page.
Remedy: Turn ‘End of Line’ hyphenation permanently off on software and use ‘Non-Breaking’ hyphens on words that are normally hyphenated, so that half the word is not wrapped if it falls on the end of a line. ( One way of doing this is to add the code for non-breaking hyphens to the AutoCorrect sub-menu on the Word processor ).
Always use a double space to start a sentence. That way, when people don’t grasp the meaning of a sentence and have to re-read it, they can find the beginning easier. Most word processing packages have an option to do this automatically. Pressing "Alt Gr" + "Space" keys creates an extra space in the html web language.
Never use bright white or glossy paper for text only documents. The light reflected by it makes text very hard to read. A lot of training organisations and schools are now using pastel coloured paper and almost everybody uses matt paper. Off white, recycled paper is excellent for not reflecting the light, but make sure that it is not so grey and the text such a wishy washy shade, that the 2 merge into each other.
Do not squash letters together or shrink the text size to make things fit. Letter spacing ( of which Kerning is a specific type, where certain letters in a font are set closer together ) is one of the big reasons that text can be very difficult to read. Putting a space before and after words when using brackets ( parenthesis ) can make things much easier to read; e.g. ( Cash machines eat liquid metal ). Also please try to use decent point sizes for text. The real size differs depending on font, but I find anything smaller than Arial 12 point very difficult to read.
Colour - both text and paper colours are very important. Do not use light text on lightly coloured paper and don’t use dark text on dark paper. Pick colours that have a high contrast. Also, what about people who are colour blind? How accessible are the colours that you are using - ask your friends and see if any of them are affected ( you may be surprised, a lot of people keep quite about it ) or contact your local Royal National Institute for the Blind ( RNIB ). Also, big bits of blank space & areas with pictures in are excellent ways of breaking up monotonous pages of solid text.
Don’t forget to always spell check ( & grammar check if possible ) your work before sending it to the printer. If I see a word that has got a spelling mistake in it, I do not recognise the pattern / shape of the word. I hesitate, forget the gist of the sentence ( and if it happens regularly, the meaning of the whole paragraph ) get frustrated, and find the rest of the piece harder to read and the meaning of it harder to conceptualise or visualise.
Lots of paragraphs, bullet points, short sentences ( so that the meaning of the sentence is conveyed simply ) & generous spacing between lines make pieces much easier to read. Small indents & oversized letters for the beginning of paragraphs make finding your place on the page much easier. Also, often people skip putting a blank line ( line break ) between paragraphs. This space is so important. It doesn’t need to be in as large a point size ( high ) as the rest of the text, but it must be there. Otherwise it is nigh on impossible to spot which paragraph I should be reading when I loose my place on the page.
Line spacing is especially important, because if it is too tight, people can not follow back along a line to the beginning of the next line. Then letters on the page sometimes seem to become detracted from the paper taking on three-dimensional aspects and begin to slip around the page. I get really pissed off at this stage and think, why did people not think about making the layout accessible and then I give up reading yet again!
Produced by Richard. e-mail: Dyslexic@ukf.net web www.dyslexia.ukf.net/
Interesting Links:
Adult Dyslexia Organisation (Britain)
World Wide Web Consortium - Accessibility project for people with disabilities.
© This article is copyrighted. Not because I’m a lap dog of capital, but so that I retain control & can say fuck off to the Trans-national Corporations, patronising Charities, the media & the State if they want to rip off my work and use it to make more money. Contact me & I’ll consider your request. If you do use any of this article or you have any thoughts or constructive criticisms please, please do contact me. _________________________________________________________________
Just some quick insights & thoughts:- Do you read the letters of a sentence to construct the words or do you see the patterns made by the specific arrangement of different letters and recall from memory the meaning of these patterns?
In western culture, illiteracy rates seem to be rising.1 What is the effect on the stability of society of the recent move to more oral communication accompanied by the rising power of images & pictographs? Could we hopefully be building in more instability into a system based on ecocide, so that it eventually collapses?
Interesting reading:
'The gift of Dyslexia' by Ronald D. Davis. Published by Souvenir Press. ISBN 0 285 63412 7
'How Typography Works ( and why it is important )' by Fernand Baudin Publisher: Lund Humphries
1reference page 18, Daniel J. Boorstin, ex. Director Library of Congress, Washington, USA.
Graphical letters courtesy of Rainbow &
Jacci Howard Bear of Desktop Publishing; see about.com