nf1263: okay right so moving on from the last few weeks where i've been talking 
about other empirical work that relates to either navigation or things like 
that so in previous weeks i've talked about either usability studies which sort 
of check out individual products or er evaluations doing analyses that sort of 
thing and research into different types of navigation and last week 
presentation this one's going to focus very much on reading from screen okay 
and the model for the the second half of it that's the time show you what i 
mean by the second half the model for this part is definitely legibility 
studies so if you can recall the sort of things that you might have read about 
in the first year in terms of er legibility of print then this is the the 
equivalent in a way although it takes a slightly different form and i'm going 
to start off by er sort of putting the bigger picture and also describing what 
was researched in the nineteen-eighties and that tended to be making a 
comparison 
between reading from screen and reading from paper er the second part is just 
reading from screen and apologies because these case studies in reading from 
screen are my own work the reason being 'cause not very much has been done er 
it's a shame about that okay so looking at reading from screen compared with 
reading from paper right first it's useful to really remind ourselves about 
what the basic differences are and that they are fairly obvious er but they're 
listed here and i'll go through them and they're here also because some 
research in the nineteen-eighties was essentially trying to find out what might 
be what might account for the differences that there are between reading from 
screen and reading from paper so to pre-empt the the results essentially you 
read slower from screen and so a group of researchers based at I-B-M wanted to 
find out what could it be that is different about a screen compared with a 
piece of paper reading from print that might be 
responsible for these differences so why is it harder to read from screen so 
what we know are are different is the orientation because screens are most of 
the time upright in front of us whereas paper can be held like that but a lot 
of the time it will be down on the table so there's the orientation difference 
er the visual angle is different that's measuring from the text or whatever on 
the screen or on paper and how far we sit away from that and measuring that 
angle we tend to sit further away from screen than we do from from paper er and 
therefore the visual angle's different so that might be a possibility the 
aspect ratio is different in other words most screens tend to be it's true of 
this one landscape rather than protrait er that's that's generalizing and 
talking about the average sort of screen so you'll have a wide screen but it 
won't be particularly deep so there's a difference and we've got difference 
that re-, that relate to how the er how the 
text how the pixels are put onto the screen that's the dynamics so that the 
screen is refreshed rather than having something sort of solid in front of you 
on paper and you get flicker with screen er the image polarity now that's less 
the case now a difference it's less likely to be different now when we read 
from screen than print but it used to be the case that there were all sorts of 
colours i suppose used on screen so now we're m-, more likely to see black text 
on a white background on screen just like we have in print but people tried 
white text on a black background and green text on a black background er as i 
say now it's more likely that we're we're reading the same because they did 
find that black on white is better and then we've got all sorts of typographic 
characteristics that that might that once in the nineteen-eighties were 
different on screen compared with print so actually what these researchers did 
was to look at each particular variable 
or each particular difference and to try and isolate whether that one was the 
one that was responsible for it being more difficult to read from screen and 
they found out that none of them seem to account for it er but when you put 
them all together then there is this this problem so they couldn't actually say 
what it was in particular that accounted for that and it's er just like yeah 
namex you said that last week didn't you when you put lots of things together 
it improves the design but thing individually those things might not make a 
difference it's sort of the same thing in reverse you remember you do 
[laughter] right along the bottom here there is er this this is going back to 
Jakob Nielsen who i've mentioned quite a few times he has this sort of column i 
suppose called Alert Box it's it's quite an interesting thing to read so i 
would just recommend er casting your eye over that so you'd be able to get to 
that from the web 
pages it's just quite a good reference it feels sort of a bit naive in relation 
to print the first part of it but as you get lower down it's really pointing 
out some of the differences which is a think there's some useful things just to 
to remind you so that might be worth following up okay so the conclusions of 
this were and and should repeat it was in the n-, late nineteen-eighties so we 
were talking about different sorts of screens to the sorts of screens we have 
now but you can't find a single factor responsible and if if the quality is 
improved there there ought to be smaller differences between reading from 
screen and from print right so if we move on to some of the research that's 
been done that has compared how we read from screen er or the outcomes when we 
read from screen compared with paper people have divided up the way in which 
you measure this into two categories and these are outcome measures and process 
measures so i'll start with the outcome 
measures i suspect this is all terribly familiar to you namex isn't it 'cause 
you've done an essay on this yeah there's a review article by Andrew Dillon 
that i just noticed just now is not on your reading list but it's a good one 
that does actually summarize all of this what i've put on your reading list is 
the book that er is much more comprehensive so right so this er these are sort 
of summaries of or bringing together er the various studies that have been done 
and it seemed to be the case that all the research that was done initially er 
in relation to reading from screen were making comparisons with print it seemed 
that that was the only interest you know why is it different let's always make 
this comparison so most of the studies that were done found that people read 
more slowly from screen than they do from paper or from print and it's about 
twenty to thirty per cent slower so that's that's reasonably substantial er 
there were or there was an odd study er as in the 
case of just one study it wasn't particularly odd er that found that reading 
speed wasn't affected so there wasn't a difference between print and between 
and screen and it was in in bringing them together and seeing that this 
particular study was different it's probably the case that the texts were too 
short because if you don't give a long enough time period for people to read 
then you're not actually going to pull out these differences so i would say 
it's a pretty reliable finding that we read slower from screen terms of 
accuracy one of the ways that you can see there the accuracy is measured is by 
giving a proofreading task which is a different type of accuracy to saying well 
can you acculatery accurately remember what you've read er it is obviously 
looking for errors on screen and those studies found that it you weren't people 
weren't finding it more difficult to proofread from screen than from paper and 
i don't know about you but that seems to me a rather 
surprising finding because how many times do you look at something on screen 
print it out and then find that there are typos now either we don't put the 
same sort of attention into checking on screen or it is more difficult now i 
i'm not saying that that study is er that there's anything wrong with that 
study er the result still or the results still stand but i suspect that the 
particular task wasn't sensitive enough to pick out the differences that i 
think are probably there 
sm1264: all of them the results were so dependent on the task 
nf1263: yeah 
sm1264: some of them require them to read the screen and then write an essay on 
it 
nf1263: yeah 
sm1264: and the task and that will be dependent on the person's er ability to 
write an essay you see and have different results just from that 
nf1263: you mean they didn't compare that with them reading from print and 
writing an essay they just 
sm1264: yeah they did it both ways but often the tasks in the experiments were 
completely different from each other so it really depended on individual's 
ability 
nf1263: yeah 
sm1264: ability of the task as well 
nf1263: yes right so maybe the the the tasks are questionable then in 
themselves they're 
sm1264: that's the er thing i think in that they found the tasks were more 
nf1263: yeah 
sm1264: problems 
nf1263: yeah can 
sf1265: i think also you find that er when you if you're on you know you're on 
screen people rely on the spellchecker 
nf1263: that's true 
sf1265: to for everything whereas they actually and it's only when you've got 
it you know in your hand reading it that you realize you haven't covered all 
the you know grammar 'cause they don't they can't pick it up all the time with 
spellcheckers 
nf1263: yeah so that suggests that there's probably both things going on 
we're not necessarily trying so hard i mean maybe 
sf1265: lets you think the spellchecker will pick it up 
nf1263: because we think it pick it up but maybe also i mean the main thing is 
that the resolution is poorer isn't it and so it's it's harder i would say that 
has to make it slightly harder to read and because of that er i suspect there's 
there's an influence so if we get to screens of six-hundred dots per inch then 
maybe we would expect not to have the problems but we would still have them if 
say we we're relying on er on automatic checks that aren't going to be 
infallible you know yeah so i i it's also 'cause we mentioned fatigue as well y-
, it's also the case i would i mean i would feel that it's it is more tiring 
reading for a long time on screen but can you put people in an experiment and 
try and simulate the sort of natural tasks i'm not sure that you can so er so 
there's suggestions there that if you carry on reading for longer maybe there 
are er fatiguing effects and if you have a demanding 
task then you're less accurate but er who knows so those are are outcome 
measures because they're measuring sort of performance how quickly you do 
something or whether it's got there are errors or things like that think i've 
got a few more yeah continue with the outcome measures another outcome measure 
is whether you can recall and understand what you've read and again the studies 
have shown that there isn't a difference so we're equally as good at 
understanding what we've read on screen and on paper according to that but 
there is always in this sort of work the possibility that we trade-off how 
quickly we read with how well we take it in this is the speed-accuracy trade-
off so that for example we might decide to slow down our reading from screen to 
make sure that we take it all in because we're going to be asked questions 
afterwards or if we speed up reading we might actually get worse in terms of 
comprehension so it's important in in sort of assessing whether 
something is legible i suppose we're saying i-, is it is the screen legible but 
you you bring you take into account not only how quickly you read but whether 
people also understand what they've read and that's true of all legibility 
research and then people were asked for preferences and this is where in a a 
very strange sort of experiment it seems to be the the outcome is that if you 
use high quality you've got high quality screens high quality paper then no 
preference but people were preferring paper because it was a higher quality er 
output so don't think that's surprising at all that says nothing about the 
differences between screen and paper just a preference for higher quality 
higher resolution 
right so the other comparisons are the the process measures and we've got fewer 
of those these are harder to measure but it's as it sounds you're they're 
looking at how people are doing something rather than what the end result of 
that doing is so as you probably recall eye movement studies have been done for 
reading print looking at er how big the the saccades are the the way wh-, when 
we jump from one part of a word to another part er how long we fixate for 
whether we need to go back if we've missed something er so those sorts of 
studies have been done for reading from screen as well but not found a a big 
difference er i suspect i wouldn't have predicted that because i s-, i guess 
we're so practised at reading print that this sort of automatic process will er 
take effect from reading from screen as well but that's my guess looks like 
there's no 
differences there er and then some fairly obvious things the manipulation is 
less direct that's really just pointing out what we know anyway that when 
you've got paper you turn over a page by er sort of picking it up or whatever 
whereas we've got the mouse as the intervening variable or the keyboard or 
whatever that's in between us and the action taking effect er but basically if 
the appropriate tools are there then there's not a particular problem and i 
guess we're getting past the time when er you come across people well when you 
come across a lot of people that aren't able to to use a mouse i mean i i-, y-, 
don't have to go back too far in teaching in this department to have people not 
able initially to use a mouse but i don't think we're going to get that sort of 
thing any more er but actually in the experiments that i'm going to describe in 
just a moment we didn't use the mouse because we wanted to have someone come in 
to do our experiment and not have to 
say well you know when you move this up the cursor will go up sort of thing so 
we only let people use the keyboard 'cause there is that initial learning do 
any of you remember when you first used a mouse what it felt like [laughter] 
sf1266: 
nf1263: did you have any trouble did you 'cause some people are er are sort of 
like this yeah when they s-, first start because because you don't realize you 
can if you get to the edge of the table you can pick the mouse up and put it 
back where it was and still go down again you don't have to have the same 
amount of movement as as you have on the screen none of you did that did you i 
don't know i've seen quite a lot of people doing that you're all very quiet as 
well [laughter] er and then finally what i've talked about quite a lot is the 
is the navigation that it's more complicated than in in books we've got i 
suppose more things that we can do moving forwards backwards previous pages and 
things like that 
and we might get lost so those are just sort of summarizing some of the the 
main differences okay so those that is what people were interested in making 
the comparisons between reading from screen and reading from print this is 
moving into the second section which i-, are it's basically two case studies of 
reading from screen er so i decided that i didn't want to compare reading print 
and reading from stree-, screen because i didn't actually see the point of that 
because yes you find it's different but really it seems to me what we want to 
do is to find out how we can make it better or easier for us to read from 
screen rather than worry about how it's different from print and as i said at 
the beginning there wasn't or there still isn't very much done on typographic 
variables or things that i would call typographic in relation to to reading 
from screen so we've got all this stuff on the legibility of print admittedly a 
lot of it done by Tinker and coworkers 
but there's not the volume that's of research for for reading from screen and 
so you have to think about why and i suppose one obvious reason is that it's 
more recent and so maybe there hasn't been time for people to do the research 
or maybe people think well we know it all because we've got the the legibility 
of print research so we'll just use that or maybe people get er frustrated by 
the fact that screens are changing and so they think well what's the point of 
doing this research because in five years time it'll be obsolete because 
there'll be a different screen and certainly the the s-, some of the stuff that 
has been done again from the nineteen-eighties early nineties doesn't use d-, 
the same sort of screens as we have now so you do think well is it is that 
useless because it's a different sort of screen or i've got one more up my 
sleeve as to why people don't do this sort of research people don't think 
typography is important coming back to our theme of last 
week but is it this is a variation on it because people that work on computer 
stuff or human-computer interaction stuff tend not to be typographers they're 
not okay so they might be computer scientists or they might be psychologists or 
whoever and i do have some evidence that they they don't really think that the 
sort of factors that we're interested in i hope like let's say line length 
'cause that's what we're going to be talking about they sort of think well yes 
so what er so this is sort of the same theme as last week so you're not going 
to find people that are going to put together it seems to me the typography 
with the the screen stuff so i should say well great that's lucky because i'm 
doing that and there's not many many more people doing it but when people say 
the sort of so what it's a bit disheartening well that's enough of the preamble 
though so i wanted to find out really er answers to questions about the 
legibility of text on screen and i 
phrased the first question in a fairly general way by saying what amount of 
text really is best for maximum legibility and that's 'cause i'm talking about 
layout but i'm talking about things like the line length or the number of 
columns so there is a different volume of text on screen if you've got a long 
line length as compared to a short one now i know you know what line lengths 
look like but i will be showing you the material in a bit so that was the first 
question and that was combined with er what i've called method of movement or 
the person i worked with called and all of that is either scrollling going down 
line by line through the text or paging which is going from one screenful of 
text pressing a button and getting a second screenful so it's equivalent to 
turning over the page yeah so you don't gradually scroll through so those two 
things er were varied and i looked at in the first experiments that i did right 
so what was i measuring and basically i 
was trying to measure lots of things because as i sort of mentioned last week 
it can be very difficult to find any differences so if you have quite a broad 
spectrum of er measures then you hope that somewhere something will come out of 
it and i wouldn't dream of comparing typefaces 'cause i don't think anything 
would come out of it so got people to read from screen and timed how long it 
took them to silently read from screen and the way that we did that was 
basically the the computer started the clock at the beginning and when they got 
to the end it stopped the clock so i didn't even have to sort of sit there and 
watch them i checked their comprehension and i wouldn't say i tested their 
comprehension because it was not a particularly sensitive way to measure 
comprehension what i did was er borrowing from some other people i asked or i 
put a set of questions and said could you answer these questions from what 
you've read so they didn't have to answer them but they could 
they just had to say yes or no so there would be a question like you know did 
Fred fall down the hill now if that had been included in what they had read 
then they could say yes i could answer that if it hadn't been they would say no 
now it might sound an extremely obscure way of of checking comprehension but 
the reason to do it this way is that is does check whether someone's read 
because if they get fifty per cent right then they're guessing so they haven't 
or they haven't taken it in properly and the other thing is that it's very easy 
to mark because if you ask the question er what did Fred do then you have to 
decide whether what someone answers is correct or not because they're not going 
to use exactly the right wording so it's essentially just easier to do this 
sort of thing 
sf1267: do they know they're being timed 
nf1263: yeah they did yeah yeah that's a good point to make though i think we 
sort of said they also knew they had to answer questions so that th-, you got 
to think are they going to 
speed through or and think that's more important or or sort of or try and make 
sure they understood the questions no could answer the questions er the other 
thing we did i've called it record of keystrokes was again the computer sort of 
recorded how they moved through the document so we took the mouse away and they 
had to use the cursor keys so you go down with the pointer and and back up with 
the pointer and every time they pressed a key there was a record of when they 
pressed it and the fact that they had pressed it so what you can map out is 
whether someone is scrolling through fairly slowly so perhaps moving a little 
bit reading a little bit moving a little bit or perhaps whether they're reading 
a whole screenful and then scrolling through a whole screenful for the page 
pages that's not particularly interesting but it is for the scrolling you can't 
tell when someone is reading but you can tell when they're not scrolling and 
you might guess that they're probably 
reading if if they're not scrolling 'cause otherwise they'd just be looking out 
the window which is a possibility of course we can't help that and then finally 
we we got the s-, the s-, in a sense the preference although that wasn't quite 
the question but after they'd done the reading er then they were shown pairs of 
things they'd read and said which do you think is easiest to read and they get 
all of the combinations of pairs so you might think that they would base that 
on their feelings about having read it or maybe they'd just base it on what 
they s-, th-, see in front of them but certainly they had experienced the 
reading at that point so these these are sort of methods for for this lot of 
work so first one looking at line length and trying to show you what it looks 
like this is the shortest line length you'll be pleased to hear and i can't 
simulate it exactly 'cause i don't know how to get rid of the two er menus at 
the top but essentially there were no menus at all 
so you've got er a screen that only has the text on it and it was in this 
typeface and the paragraphs were like this so this is approximately twenty-five 
characters per line the narrowest and i can't also ca-, show you the scro-, the 
er the paging but if you were scrolling mm then you would go down line by line 
and then when you got to the bottom it would start to to move up but in fact in 
the paged version it would jump from the top to the bottom 
so this one's the narrow one there were six line lengths i'm so i'm showing you 
the narrowest one vaguely in the middle oh that's if i can find it er right 
that's twenty-five the one in the middle and then i'll show you the the the 
extreme one the longest line length so that's fifty-five characters per line so 
you're probably feeling a bit more comfortable with this one er and then the 
the widest one which essentially was done to fill the whole screen okay so if 
we get back right so there were six line lengths and they 
could either be in a scrolling version or in er a paged version and did you 
expect this that the one that was read the fastest was that one that filled the 
screen one-hundred characters per line i didn't er to be fair er although it 
was read it was the fastest i think if you 'cause you know a little bit about 
statistics it was only significantly different from the very narrowest one so 
er but it was still if you looked at at looked right across the six of them it 
was the the fastest one so i've thought ah well maybe i've got something here 
er but when people making their judgements about what's easiest to read they 
did not consider that the easiest to read they thought it was the least easiest 
to read so they probably had the sort of reaction that you would have i think 
that er that really looks quite overwhelming er the check on comprehension ju-, 
didn't show any differences because of course there is the possibility of this 
speed-accuracy trade-off you see a screen full 
of text and you think ergh i'm just going to try and get through that ge-, er 
and then you you don't actually take it in but it appeared not to be the case 
er now needless to say you know sort of colleagues didn't think this was the 
result that i should find or it's the sort of thing that you think know can you 
really go around recommending these long line lengths on screen certainly 
before i did this research i was giving tutorials saying use quite short line 
lengths on screen probably shorter than in print because it's more difficult to 
read from the screen er so you look for reasons why you might get something 
like this was there something about the experiment and if you can i won't go 
back to it but if you can think back to that narrow line length there was a 
screen the screen was all white the background was white and certainly some of 
the people found it quite glaring so there might have been a problem with line 
lengths that don't fill the screen because 
it's bright and it's glaring so we changed to grey and just to show you as an 
image of what that looked like rather than the actual screen so now we've just 
got the background as grey and didn't go through all six line lengths just went 
through the twenty-five the s-, the shortest the middle and the longest and er 
well it got a bit more blurry er now er not the screen the results got er got 
blurred er and it wasn't so obvious that this long line length was speeding 
people up what was certainly obvious and it again is logically the case anyway 
is that if you've got a very narrow line length you've got to scroll down sort 
of screens and screens for the same length as document if if you've got a wide 
line length you've only got a few screenfuls so it's actually quicker 
mechnically to get through er a short fat a sort of a wide er not particularly 
tall document so maybe that's all it it was i didn't think it was but that 
certainly was contributing having to scroll 
through a long document right it sort of that never became totally clear but i 
moved on to something related although not exactly the same which was to 
compare columns of text because and i forgot to mention this bit earlier this 
work was funded by Microsoft Corporation because they really wanted to find out 
about how people read from screen or rather what's er useful layouts and so on 
and so forth and i know last week we talked about sort of who does experiments 
influencing er the results but fortunately they there was no way in which they 
they influenced these 'cause they couldn't really except to say the sort of 
things they were interested in looking at and about this time which was 
probably about five years ago er they were starting an online magazine web 
magazine called Slate and they were interested in whether to use single columns 
or multiple columns for that now my my view is that you can't put text on 
screen in three columns and have it scrolling er now i 
know thi-, this is true on the web but if you think about what you're having to 
do then you're having to read down scroll down get to the bottom of a column 
scroll back up come down again scroll back up so my reckoning having three 
columns it's got to be in a paged format you've got to be able to read what's 
on screen and then get the next page as such the next screenful 
sm1268: can you not have three columns and just wait for them 
nf1263: you wa-, right yeah [laughter] the trouble is i'm ass-, i'm assuming 
that everyone has the same size screen of course because if you've got a tiny 
one you're going to have to scroll down anyway but that was where i started 
from that three columns has got to be paged since i was comparing it with a 
single column i then compared it with that column being scrolled or being paged 
so that finds out whether it's scrolling that's causing something or whether 
it's the columns er right show you the sort of size that i was working with so 
there gone 
back to the the grey surround er and the three columns yeah so for those that 
you probably did all get it by then i i think you can't sort of carry on having 
to scroll down and come back up here so you do all three and then you press 
somethng and you get another screenful and the single column was about eighty 
characters per line so we're probably talking yeah it covered the same sort of 
area it's a pretty pretty long line again right so what we found there was that 
the the it was the single column the fairly long line length that was read 
fastest faster than three columns er and it was faster in paged because i think 
you basically it's faster because you haven't got to scroll so you just save 
time on having to do that mechanical thing but we happened to be recording how 
old p-, our participants were and most of them were within this age range we 
didn't take exact ages within the age range eighteen to twenty-four because we 
recruited from within the university but we 
did have some that were twenty-five plus [exclamation] and they showed a 
different pattern or rather the the younger ones the eighteen to twenty-four 
year olds were showing this this pattern and not everyone else so why is it 
that a particular age group should read a single column faster than than 
everyone else basically so everyone else didn't show a difference between 
everyone else being the older people didn't show a difference between three 
columns and a single column but eighteen to two-, twenty-four year olds did 
i've only had i've i've made one guess at this but i i've you're eighteen to 
twenty-four year olds aren't you mostly does anyone squeeze out the top 
sm1269: so what's your guess 
nf1263: my guess is that they were more used to reading web pages and that the 
the text could have looked pretty similar to that and not in three columns 
sm1270: were they eighteen to twenty-four year olds 
nf1263: eigh-, twenty-four four year olds were more used to than the 
older people yeah and so it was kind of a 
sm1270: well 
nf1263: familar-, familiarity thing 
sm1270: and they read less newspapers 
nf1263: yeah d-, if it if it does generalize from print yeah you would think 
that the column thing would come out yeah it it sligh-, gets slightly more 
complicated er no i haven't put it on an overhead but if you if you also what i 
did was to divide the group into faster and slower readers basically just 
because you've got the times and looked at whether there were differences er 
there make sure i get this right 'cause it's complicated er faster readers were 
showing although generally there were no differences in comprehension faster 
readers were showing better comprehension when they were reading the three 
columns so the-, there's two funny things happening here there's an age 
differential and faster readers seem to be showing something a bit different to 
slower readers as well er now those were sort of indications and i i just put 
them in now because 
they did er feed in to what i went on to do after that but just to conclude 
this part before moving on to the second case study i would say that these 
together have suggested that longer line lengths may be okay on screen there is 
this problem that people are definitely saying well i don't think it's easier 
to read but they are reading them fairly fast and they don't apparently ap-, be 
reading them without taking in what they read because they appear to be able to 
to answer questions however my second point there may be different levels of 
comprehension i don't think what i wa-, the way i was measuring comprehension 
was particularly sensitive so my feeling is that maybe er with a long line 
length there's a possibility that they're they're skimming it because it's 
rather uncomfortable but i can't pick that up because of the way i'm testing it 
and i'm suggesting maybe different reading patterns according to age or 
according to how fast you read sort of from the last 
results there but what seems to be absolutely certain is that we can't say 
we've done all this research in print let's use those results we don't know 
what the optimum line length is for reading from screen my research hasn't 
shown it but my research has questioned that fifty-five characters or seventy 
characters the sort of thing that that comes out of print is the right line 
length for screen so we shouldn't rely on that 
er but the reason to go on with the next s-, sort of series of studies was c-, 
i suppose my uncomfortableness with this one-hundred characters per line and 
and reco-, and recommending that and also other people being uncomfortable 
other colleagues so my thoughts were that long line lengths can be read as far 
can be read as fast but they're perhaps that we definitely not perceived as 
easy to read so perhaps there is a problem with comprehension that's really 
just summarizing already and perhaps there's something happening with faster 
reading 
because we're finding some sort of differences there so what i went on to do 
was to essentially look at different reading rates so to get people to first of 
all read at their normal speed and then to try and speed them up er this is the 
fast reading rate and the way that we did that was essentially to train people 
to read faster than they do normally so we're not trying to get everyone to a 
certain reading speed but we tried to get people to a speed that was twice as 
fast as they normally read so get them to read something and then you say okay 
try reading the next document faster than that and you see how fast they read 
it and then say okay well try reading a bit faster than that if they haven't 
got up to twice the speed and what we found perhaps not too surprising it is 
very difficult to read at twice the speed that you normally read at if you're 
still trying to take in what you're reading so we actually stopped at allowing 
people to read at 
seventy seventy per cent faster not twice as fast sounds like it's more but 
they wouldn't have to speed up quite as much as that er still interested in 
line lengths 'cause i had some sort of idea that different line lengths might 
be more useful at different speeds and maybe it's handy to have a long line 
length when you read fast but it's not when you're reading at a normal speed 
something like that but because i thought well this comprehension thing isn't 
really working that i set out to measure comprehension in a different way and 
to try and to tease out perhaps different things that might be lost when you 
read fast so there were various different types of questions one referring to 
the title one to a main idea and i'll show you what those are it's probably 
easier than er course you don't know what the text is all about so this is 
slightly abstract here er multiple choice questions which believe me are 
incredibly hard to set because fair enough you can 
do the right answer but there's a real problem in getting two alternatives that 
are vaguely plausible so essentially these these two alternatives that are 
wrong have come from somewhere in the document so that people might be fooled 
by them so this was a document all about Monaco and casinos and stuff like that 
so you there's a qu-, one question which says which is the best title which i-, 
which is best fits the text so you've got to have got a sort of overview of 
what you've read to be able to answer that 'cause it doesn't exist within the 
document then there's a question that's a main idea so what the sort of gist is 
of the document er and Monaco is either dedicated to the principle of fabulous 
excess motor sport or strength in the continuity of the monarchy course you 
might be able to answer these without reading there's always a danger without 
reading the document structure question that's that's an important one because 
it came out very very badly and 
this is actually just asking the question as to what happened when or what 
happened before something else so what you've got to remember is the sequence 
of events in something that you've read so who does the autor author interview 
just before blah blah blah so these three people would have come up somewhere 
in that document then you've got incidental sort of detailed questions h-, er 
with some a number in that case er and there was also one that didn't refer to 
a number and then a main factual question which wasn't the main idea but was 
still something fairly major and then finally this is remembering precise 
wording so you have to say whether this precise wording was in something that 
you've read and the ones that weren't in there were taken from another part of 
the document so you've got the same writing style so what i hoped to find was 
well i thought this must be really sensitive so maybe people'll lose some of 
these things they wi-, won't be able 
to answer some of them but they will be able to answer others right so still 
found that short line lengths are read slower this had twenty-five fifty-five 
and one-hundred again so your very short your medium line length and your long 
line length but the long ones the long line length wasn't coming out much much 
better it was the same as the medium line length so i'm losing my my good 
effect of a long line length it just doesn't seem to be coming out in the same 
way as it did in the first experiment but there were differences in 
comprehension which was good because that was something that i hadn't found 
before so this was more sensitive and it's the middling line length that 
essentially is coming out better so comprehension's better and those line 
lengths are read reasonably fast er when people read fast as you might expect 
their comprehension is poorer so that that you want to find that because it 
makes sure that what you're you actually got a sensitive 
measuring instrument that was found and people recall less detail rather than 
the main facts so what goes is the detail but the one that i sort of mentioned 
just now for some reason people had much more difficulty with remembering where 
something came within the text the structure question than they did any of the 
other questions and that's regardless of how fast or or slow they were reading 
and again giving a stab at why this might happen all of this was scrolling text 
and i think i've referred to this before what you lose in scrolling text that 
you have in books is any cue to where something sits on a page so whereas in a 
book you might think oh yes that idea came on er a left page near the top you 
haven't got that sort of indication when you've got text that you just scroll 
through and maybe that somehow influences you recalling where certain things 
happened within the text that's one of those guesses that i haven't got any f-, 
more evidence for and the final 
thing that i was trying to do by looking at how people scrolled was to say well 
is there are there good ways of scrolling through text that either speed us up 
so we can read faster if we want to do that 'cause maybe we want to just skim 
read or are there other maybe the same methods or different methods that enable 
us to understand better so i was looking for the characteristics of effective 
readers an effective reader might be a fast reader or an effective reader might 
be someone that's good at understanding what they've read and maybe depending 
on the task you have different different demands maybe you want to read quickly 
or maybe you want to to study it more and get more out of it and there are 
different scrolling patterns that do match up but they are different 
depending on whether you want to read fast or understand i've just got the fast 
one here so those people that are reading fast were spending less time between 
scrolling so they were also making only a few scrolling movements so 
essentially they weren't pausing for very long to read they were keeping the 
text moving and that speeds up reading whereas people that showed better 
comprehension were sort of doing the opposite they were pausing for longer in 
between scrolling so what that might mean if i carry on and do some research is 
that you can manipulate how people scroll through text and see whether it does 
improve either their speed of reading or their comprehension because this 
doesn't do that that this just said says those readers that did that came out 
well it doesn't 
say that if if i ask you to do that then then you'll you'll come out well from 
that so in conclusion my always my conclusions are there's room for lots lots 
more research and what i can say definitely from this and it's probably the 
only thing is that i you cannot predict from print legibility research how 
people are going to read from screen and that ought to be obvious because we've 
got a more interactive way of reading we can manipulate the text in different 
ways but there seems to be something a bit more perhaps basic in relation to 
the lengths of lines that that affects how we read from screen okay