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

[smittyman]

You mean that we can use paper for printing letters and stuff? Does that come with many fonts and all?

Re:Dr. Seuss

[Nimey]

People would take that as license to write purple text on a red background.

Then Myspace would have to be invented.

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

[ArsonSmith]

This has to work. I know I can read a page twice as fast if it is double spaced.

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.

Re:Dr. Seuss

[smallfries]

Maybe I'm bucking the trend so far, but I found the reformatted versions harder to read than normal text. You're right about their bad comparison - but comparing their "poetic" formatting against normal text on a webpage (not their example) makes me think that ther technique makes it harder to read.

Their "revelation" about how the eyes scan a page is well known and understood in page design and layout. Also, the idea that the brain has to remove "clutter" from the surrounding words is false. The brain uses the pattern of the text above and below to help the eye scan back to the beginning of the line quickly. Also the brain interprets the surrounding text to get an earlier chance to parse what is coming. The line underneath is processed before it is consciously read, kind of a warm-up run.

Sadly I can't remember where I read this, or find a reference to it...

Re:Dr. Seuss

[dgatwood]

No joke. For those of us aural thinkers, this is the most annoying presentation possible. You stop in the middle of a phrase. If they diced it up by phrases, it wouldn't be bad, but hearing the words "I think" followed by a pause while your eye scans down to the words "I can" in the next line.... It's worse than children's books. It is absolutely horrible for me to read those samples.

Here's a version of that paragraph rewritten in this style. Tell me if you have a harder time reading it.

No joke.
For those
of us aural thinkers,
this is
the most annoying presentation
possible.
You stop
in the middle
of a phrase.
If they
diced it up
by phrases,
it wouldn't be
bad,
but hearing the words
"I think"
followed by
a pause
while your eye
scans down
to the words
"I can"
in the next line....
It's worse
than children's books.
It is
absolutely horrible
for me
to read those samples.

Don't get me wrong, block text is hard to read, but this can be improved significantly through using fonts that are large enough to read, using a serif font to provide additional clues about letter shapes, leaving more space between lines, and limiting your paragraphs to no more than about three or four lines of text. You don't have to insult the intelligence of the reader to get a point across...
like my post
seems
to do,
but really
doesn't.

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.

Re:Scrolling

[the_humeister]

You forgot the final line: "Burma Shave!"

Who needs Live Ink?

[morgan_greywolf]

We could all
        just start typing
              all our messages
just like this!

Nah, that might
      be too annoying...

Re:Who needs Live Ink?

[byjove]

I think you're missing the part about how the positioning of the words are determined. The algorithms used were inspired by spoken syntax: "The prosodic cues in spoken language are more complex than simple pauses at phrase boundaries; subtle variations in pitch, volume, and the duration of word pronunciation have been shown to convey hierarchical structures in syntax (Ferreira & Anes, 1994). When these prosodic-syntactic cues of speech are experimentally stripped away from audiorecordings of sentences, listeners' comprehension drops (Cutler, Dahan, & van Donselaar, 1997). This finding has important implications for reading because, when language is written down, many of these same syntactic cues are similarly stripped away" Also, according to the supporting paper, parsing sentences along these lines help support the goals of the semantic web, helping online readers to parse complex expository writing.

Re:Who needs Live Ink?

[radtea]

The algorithms used were inspired by spoken syntax:

Which may not be all that relevant to the comprehension of written language.

One aspect the linked article emphasizes is that spoken language is ephemeral, whereas written language is permanent. This is a large difference, as anyone who can read a second language with relative fluency but understand the spoken form hardly at all knows.

For this and many other reasons (no one speaks like a textbook or scientific paper for a reason--writing is far more effective at conveying certain types of information) it is problematic to claim without proof that "making writing more like speech is a good thing." In some cases it is probably true. In lots of other cases it may well be false. It will depend on the nature of the information being conveyed.

Low tech workaround

[SlayerofGods]

I personally just highlight the text with my mouse as I read through an article seems to help me keep my place and read faster.
Of course it drives anyone reading over my shoulder nuts....

If it was really better...

[AKAImBatman]

...someone would have already invented this "new" method. Unfortunately, it's not better. The text is certainly easier to follow (which proves the research), but that's only half the battle. The formatting implies certain cues such as tone, volume, and emphasis. By reformatting the text, the software loses the original cues and accidentally adds new ones. The new cues may change the overall meaning of the text resulting in a failure to communicate.

Re:If it was really better...

[dharbee]

"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.

Slower reading speeds?

[UncleTogie]

... uploading superfluous information from the two lines above and the two lines below...The result is slower reading speeds and decreased comprehension.
WTF? This is how I've always done speed-reading...

Re:Slower reading speeds?

[WrongSizeGlass]

WTF? This is how I've always done speed-reading... I always do my speed reading by skipping the article and just posting on /.

Less confusing?

[Aladrin]

That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.) Then I have to force my eye back to the beginning of the sentence and try to ignore the different colors. Then, because there's a break between that sentence and the next, I have to do the same thing all over again.

And what's the difference if my eyes are pulling words from the previous and next sentence or the pieces of the current one? It's still giving me information that I don't need -right now- in the sentence.

And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.

Training myself to read this, which is only used online and only if licensed by this company, would be a hassle. And used very little.

Summary

[norminator]

I couldn't understand the summary... there is too much text there in one big block. Could someone please explain it to me... maybe reformat it so it's easier to read?

Re:Summary

[Aminion]

Summary: buy our product.

This is great...

[pointbeing]

The company has developed a product that automatically re-formats text in a way that your brain can more easily comprehend. Pictures of Japanese schoolgirls?

Biased images? Nahhh....

[Carik]

First impressions when looking at the image that accompanies this article:
1) The block text version is actually blurred. Compare the initial "M" from each side... there's a major difference in clarity of the image.
2) I find the "clear" version nearly impossible to read. It's a bit too randomly coloured and formatted.
3) The people who did this research are idiots.

OK, so two of the three are subjective. But I'm pretty certain about the first, and I think the third is pretty likely.

Add in the points other people have mentioned -- long scroll times, loss of standard formatting tricks to convey meaning -- and this all starts looking pretty useless to me.

Re:Ode to a Filter

[adamjaskie]

I try to forrmat my writing
In a way that is easy to read.
But Slashdot has Lameness filtering
That makes it difficult indeed.

The preview button yells to me
"Use me! Use me!" I hear it shout.
Alas, my naughty fingers flee
A bit to the left; I've lost this bout.

Seuss - No, it's Code Formatting!

[StCredZero]

They just went and put an indenter on the English Language!

Now someone needs to invent a variant of English that requires indentation as a part of the syntax. It would be the Python of natural languages. Pyglish?

Re:Seuss - No, it's Code Formatting!

[thehickcoder]

No, that would be Pyg Latin!

Re:Seuss - No, it's Code Formatting!

[mblase]

Well, it's not just indenting -- you can see from the highlights that they're breaking lines according to where the verbs are, kinda like those sentence diagrams you hated doing in junior high, and indenting according to the role that verb plays.

(On the flip side, this seems to suggest that the engine needs to work entirely differently based on what language you're reading.)

I'm kind of impressed, actually, in that the engine makes any kind of text look and read like non-rhyming poetry, implying that poets figured this technique out centuries before anyone actually codified it.

Looks strangely familiar...

[shadowspar]

seeing the article
text, strangely familiar
where have I seen it?

the light bulb goes on
a haiku generator
can it truly be?

Re:For me, the vertical text was awful

[jdray]

The GP's reformatted paragraph didn't take into account the line indentation that the article showed.  I think part of the trick for them is to make the "carriage return" shorter, making your eyes have to travel less distance to get to the next piece of the sentence.  Note how, in the article, the lines that started indented were short, so that the distance from the end of them to the beginning of the next line, which was indented less, still wasn't much?  This keeps the text from creeping across the page as it goes down.

Also, if you try to read
    something that
  is randomly
broken
     along indeterminate
   points in a sentence,
then it will be
   much harder to
read than if it has

      been dissected into
   parts that pay attention
          to the natural
     breaks in the language.