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Re: Books on making websites accessible?

for

From: Karl Groves
Date: Apr 18, 2008 12:40PM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto:webaim-forum-
> <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jukka K. Korpela
> Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 1:23 PM
> To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Books on making websites accessible?
>
> 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.

"Typographers' consensus"? Weird, I didn't know typographers also did
human-computer interaction.


>
> 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

So what you're saying is that we should discount any science produced before
1998? Come on, Jukka. I've been reading your site & your posts to usenet and
this list long enough to know you're smarter than that.


> very specialized - not about readability or understandability but about
> scannability (for given words)

Surely you don't think people actually *read* what's on screen
word-for-word, do you?

Karl