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."

Comments

Dr. Seuss

[Nimey]

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.

Re:Dr. Seuss

[cyphercell]

http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/ beforeafter1.jpg

I noticed several things that make it difficult for me to actually evaluate the difference. First each uses a different font, then the one that is supposed to be inferior ends with an incomplete sentance "A cell is" - making it gramatically inferior, if you zoom in you'll notice that the inferior sample didn't compress well in the jpg, the fonts are different sizes, and finally live link labeling the new sample as "Section 1:" provides more contextual information making it in fact more informative. While these changes are subtle each by themselves they are all time tested methods for improving text. Don't blur the text, add contextual info, complete your sentances and use standardized grammar. If this is the standard output from their software then this is truly not impressive. Aside from these issues, haven't people used collumns for a long time too?

Re:Dr. Seuss

[TheRaven64]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't discard the extra 'noise' that I get from reading. I read roughly every second or third line, build up a composite image of the paragraph, tokenise it in parallel, and then parse it from that. It's a much better fit with how the optical system works than how people tend to describe reading, and possibly why I read a lot faster than most people I know. This new system slows my reading rate a lot.

Scrolling

[athloi]

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.