So, yesterday Jem made a post about “web naughties” in which she confessed her love for justified text. Now, as I’m sure you can probably guess, I too love justified text and sure, I’ve heard the arguments against it like everyone else has, but I got to wondering; does justified text really make text harder to read and (maybe more importantly) does it actually matter?
I was only wondering about it in a kind of idle, abstract fashion until I saw the following comment — addressed to me — left by Jordan.
The issue with justified text on a computer, is that it’s an entirely different source of light. It’s NOT the same as a newspaper, magazine, or book. Those are different sources of light. They reflect.
Having justified text on screen causes the eyes to notice patterns in the text, and can sometimes confuse a reader or even distract them. Keeping the text left aligned (for those of us that read languages that go left/right) also helps our eyes to scan the words better.
Your website is a bit of a perfect example. You have a larger line height with justified text. It isn’t easy on the eyes to read that. If you lessened the line height and remove the justification, it would definitely be more readable for a user.
Quoted From: Jordan
Now, my first impression of this was one of snide lulz because, while this is probably about the politest thing Jordan has ever said to me,1 I was amused she still couldn’t resist a little dig at my site. Ooh, burn! So, I went to her site to check out the alleged readability of her text; as I suspected, single-spaced left aligned 8 point Verdana, black on white; the ultimate “look at me I’m accessible!” option. Thing is, you know how everyone always talks about text readability being aimed at people with poor eyesight? Well, guess what. That’s me you’re talking about. Sure, I don’t use a magnifier, but I have massive astigmatism and a hardening in my lenses that makes focusing difficult and causes my eyes get incredibly fatigued when reading text off a screen (you know that feeling in your eyes when you’re really tired? Well, I get that all the time). The net result is that I’m incredibly sensitive to the formatting of text,2 and one of the things that really gives me a headache really fast is trying to read single-spaced lines. I mean, the fact that I personally think they’re incredibly ugly aside, the squashed words and lines have a tendency to all run together for me and make it much more difficult for me to focus and much easier for me to ‘skip’ lines. I need my white space! Not only does my personal sense of aesthetics think it looks nicer, but it’s much less likely to give me a raging headache for the rest of the day.
See, the thing is, the fact that I like double-spaced lines is subjective. That’s my whole point; because it is subjective, it essentially negates the ‘fact’ Jordan was trying to slap me with that single-spaced left-aligned text “isn’t easy on the eyes”.
So, curious, I went trawling Google for readability studies regarding text displayed on screens rather than in print. I couldn’t find very many. I could find plenty of opinions on the subject, sure, but only one a couple of actual studies and they were primarily about font face and size (12 point Verdana, if you’re wondering). See, text readability is about a hell of a lot more than just whether or not your text is justified or not. Actually, the justification of text wasn’t even mentioned very much at all; it seemed to be a relatively minor consideration. So what does contribute to text readability?
Factors Contributing to Text Readability (A List)
- Font Face
The actual font of your text seems to be the primary factor in its readability. Serif versus sans-serif is always a hotly-contested issue, and from what I’ve read it seems that most people read sans-serif fonts slightly faster than serif fonts, but the actual physical shape of the letters is important as well. Up until very recently, most fonts were designed for print and had a tendency to display badly on the screen; generally by having the letters touch one another, especially at smaller point sizes, which is a great big readability no-no. So fonts like Gerogia and Verdana were designed; their hinting is specifically targeted at screen display. This is, incidentally, why Verdana at 8pt looks a lot different to Verdana at 12pt; the font attempts to compensate for the smaller text size by re-shaping its letters to improve readability. The x-height of a font seems to be important too; fonts with smaller x-heights (e.g. Century Gothic) are harder to read than fonts with slightly more pronounced x-heights (e.g. Verdana). - Text Size
Text size seems to be about the next more important factor in readability. 10-12pt seems to be ‘optimum’ for adults, with point sizes larger than that not significantly increasing readability. Anything smaller than 10pt is getting into the ‘unreadable’ territory and interestingly it seems that the older you are the more likely you are to be affected by smaller fonts (this may seem obvious until you realise that, culturally, font size is an indication of age; children’s books having large text and adult books having small text). Incidentally, this is why I make my site’s text small; to give my parents a headache when they try and read my blog (and no I am not joking). - Contrast
Black text on white seems to be the consensus as far as optimum readability goes, however with that being said, I’d just like to send out a plea from someone who is incredibly sensitive to screen glare; for gods’ sakes if you’re going to have this, have a neutral coloured background outside your text box! I’m actually much more partial to off-whites and pale colours than#FFF, which I find very harsh on my poor eyes. - Words Per Line
The more words you try and cram on any one single line, the harder it is to read (well, generally speaking; I’ve found some dissent to this). This seems to be caused by the eyes of the reader having to travel further; both to the end of the line and ‘wrapping’ back again. Most people on the web try to jam way too many words in; if you look at most books, they tend to use either 8 to 12 or 12 to 15 words per line. Before you all shout, “But The Internet Is Not A Book!”, I’m not convinced this is something we should be discounting as part of the bygone days of print. About 30-40em seems to be a good size. - Line Height
I did manage to find one study on line height (called leading in the industry), which seemed to indicate that a slightly larger gap between lines and paragraphs is, in fact, easier to read than single-spaced. Anecdotal evidence from designers backs this up. - Margins
How far away your text is from the ‘edge’ of its bounding box. Butting your text right up against the edge is generally considered a no-no. - Alignment
People seem to have awfully strong opinions on the subject, but nevertheless I couldn’t actually find any studies on it. The best I can do is say that the longer your individual lines are, the less intrusive justified text becomes. On very short lines, justified text is a definite no-no due to the choppy white-space. However, when dealing with ‘normal’, body text length lines (30+em) justified text seems to emerge as a definite aesthetic winner; the consensus is that it makes text look nicer and (amongst the ‘common folk’) ‘more professional’, probably because this is how 99% of books are formatted. On the other hand, block right-aligned text is a definite no-no, and even the use of centred text is contested (and quite rare).
Readability vs Aesthetics
I’m just going to come right out and say it; if everyone on the internet decided to format their text as 40em wide 10pt black-on-white Verdana with 1.5 line-height and 2em margins I would cry. Because — c’mon people — that’s so fucking boring. We’re back onto my old bugbear here of aesthetics versus ‘accessibility’ and, as you can probably tell, I’m more in the aesthetics camp. To be perfectly frank, I think a lot of the harping that goes on about what does and doesn’t improve readability is a bit of a shield people hide behind to excuse what are essentially boring design choices. Yeah, we can all take the safe route; but do we always want to? I mean sure, if what you’re going for is 100% readability 100% of the time then by all means, go ahead, but I don’t necessarily think that this choice is any more justified (a-har!) in the context of personal websites than the designer who is prepared to shave a bit of accessibility off the edge in order to present text in a way that is more aesthetic.
I mean, if you’re designing on a proper semantic model your choices can all be over-ridden anyway if people have a real problem with them, so why not go for what you personally love? It’s your site, after all; all that 10pt left-aligned Verdana tells me about you is that you unquestioningly believe everything you read on A List Apart.
This is Not Science (Yet)
And here’s the other thing, you see, because all the guidelines on readability are just that; guidelines. Sure, on average people find 10pt Verdana easier to read than 7pt Verdana; so what? And the thing is, I don’t necessarily think it’s as simple as all that.
I’m going back to justified text again. One of the most common arguments against it is that it’s bad because it can leave larger gaps between words and this can distract your readers. But… does it? It certainly doesn’t distract me; in fact, slightly larger gaps between words actually make them sightly easier for me to read. And I think I know the reason why; I was taught whole-word reading.
Unlike people (probably most of you) who were taught phonics, I don’t read words by recognising the individual letters inside them. Instead, I register the ‘shape’ of the whole word. This is why I find it very difficult to pick out letter-shifted spelling mistakes, especially in text where I’m ‘expecting’ to see a certain word (my beta tells me I have a tendency to write ‘Brice’ instead of ‘Bruce’ for example). I’m not sure if any studies have been conducted on readability for people taught phonics versus people taught whole word reading, but from personal experience I can assert that I find words with larger white-space surrounding them much easier to read as the shapes of the words themselves become more prominent. The more squashed together words are (such as is the case with left-aligned text), the more I have to concentrate on picking out the individual shapes.
And this is what I mean when I say readability is not an exact science; because so much of it is subjective. If I find the presentation of text aesthetically pleasing, I’m more likely to try reading it than if it’s simply boringly functional (because I am vain like that). In a case of not being able to please all of the people all of the time, other people are exactly the reverse. It also seems that past biases are hugely influential on what people ‘think’ should be more readable; people who’ve been told that justified text is ‘bad’ are more likely to dislike it when they come across it than people who haven’t. And even people who advocate readability seem to vary wildly on what parts they actually implement; I’ve seen people decry justification while simultaneously implementing tiny font sizes, or hugely long lines, or small leadings. The whole thing’s a bit of a mess, in other words.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. On the one hand, I definitely think that everyone should be aware of best-practice readability but on the other hand I’d never advocate that it should be applied to everyone, all the time, in every context. Have some personality, people! I mean, unless you’re redesigning news.com.au or something.
The one thing I definitely would like to see, however, are more studies. Anyone out there need a PhD?
References
- A Study of the Readability of On-Screen Text (PDF)
- Text Font Readability Study
- Readability – making pages easy to read by design
- Reading Text Online: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts
- Compose to a Vertical Rhythm
- I told her once that being clingy and whiny on the one day of the year her boyfriend wanted to go watch wrestling with his mates was a good way to not have a boyfriend any more. Apparently, when it comes to unfounded advice, Jordan can dish it out but she certainly can’t take it. ^
- Yes, if you’re wondering; I find my own site difficult to read because of the low contrast and small font-size. If I can suck it down in the name of aesthetics, then so can you. ^
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1029 days ago
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