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Re: Books on making websites accessible?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Apr 18, 2008 11:30AM

Karl Groves wrote:

> Not to totally derail this thread, but I'd like to point out that the
> belief that long lines of text is bad is rather unfounded.

You would need very hard evidence for such a claim. There's a widespread
typographers' consensus on about 55 characters being optimal, and there
are actual studies that suggest that for readability, the optimum is
much smaller - but there are practical considerations that make the
consensus acceptable. After all, readability isn't everything.

If you mainly write for people with slow understanding,
you should write short lines
and not worry too much about the "looks".
This may mean varying-length lines.
The idea is to use line division
in a manner that aids understanding.
You divide the text into short "chunks"
and you put one "chunk" on one line.
This illustrates that line length is a tool
and not a goal.

> 1 - http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/textmargin.html is just one of
> maybe 8 studies I know of.

Please give me a break. That's a 10 years old study that is described as
very specialized - not about readability or understandability but about
scannability (for given words)

Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/