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Scientists Offer New Way to Read Online Text
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at a small startup called Walker Reading Technologies in Minnesota have determined that the human brain is not wired properly to read block text. They have found that our eyes view text as if they're peering through a straw. Not only does your brain see the text on the line you're reading, but it's also uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below. This causes your brain to engage in a tug of war as it fights to filter and ignore the noise. The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension. The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend."
It's certainly very easy to read, and the formatting reminds me of Dr. Seuss books.
The only downside I can see (if this gets used in print) is the waste of paper compared to current methods.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The screenshot
looks good.
It breaks the text down
into phrases
like poetry.
(It looks sort of
like code.)
But, for anything
other than a short document,
you will be scrolling a long time,
baby.
Just up the css line-height to 2, and call it a day.
technical writing / development
Of course their FAQs are not posted in that format.
Summary: buy our product.
"Why?"
Because paper costs money and space is limited. Both of these explanations are superior to yours.
"Poetry regularly follows such patterns, using them to express a certain spoken "tone" within the meter."
Poetry is not a legitimate comparison. Poetry is frequently formatted with no regard whatsoever to how easy it is to read. Often, the formatting is done to preserve tings which actually make it harder to read, on purpose.
"So why can't we transfer it to regular text? There must be an overriding reason?"
Because paper costs money and space is limited. Both of these explanations are superior to yours.
"When you introduce a solution to a problem, you need to make sure that it's easily adoptable."
No actually you don't.
"Is the new solution truly superior if the supposedly superior solution is more difficult to use than the solution it replaces?"
Did you really say this? How many things did you learn as a child that you found a better way to do later, but had to learn first? If it's difficult at first, but then becomes more efficient after learning, then yes it is better.
It seems that ultimately your only real objection is that this is "inelegant", which has caused you to manufacture other spurious objections in order to justify your dislike of this methods aesthetics.
This sounds like the conventional wisdom from your basic Tech Writing class, where the rule of thumb is; at least 50% whitespace on the page.
In fact, childrens' book typesetters have known about this, ever since there have been childrens' books.
Now - for reading text on the web; I've noticed - particularly in ad-supported content, that there's a trend (who am I kidding? It's been the standard for over 10 years now - and before that; ad-supported print) - to condense text to make more room for ads. (which is why the text-size plugins for firefox are so great!).
Sorry, but I'm not too terribly impressed with this "study".
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