How To Change Font Color Of Print For Reading Ease On The Internet

It'due south rare to retrieve about it, merely moving your eyes dorsum and along over lines of text is one of the most commonly performed bodily motions.

When reading, your eyes go from discussion to word, left to right, one after another. When you hit the end of the line, your optics brand what'due south called a return sweep. They go back to the left, to the outset of the adjacent line. During that sweep, we get a little time to process information. (Are yous thinking near it now?)

That sweep is also where many of u.s.a. mess up. Nosotros lose fourth dimension. Well-nigh people don't go all the way back to the start give-and-take, for example. Nosotros tend to land on the second or 3rd word in a line, and then make another backwards movement to get to that get-go word. That's inefficient.

Similar any concrete movement, they're a matter of practice and coordination. The mechanics of getting text into one'due south brain require skill autonomously from that involved in processing the pregnant in that text. As with something like pond or skateboarding, it's a skill where well-nigh people can become good, simply everyone'southward chapters for speed and precision is not equal.

But at that place are means to enhance our abilities.

To illustrate this, try reading this passage (from Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers):

Then try reading it like this:

The colors in this text are rendered in a precise and strategic way, designed to assist people read quickly and accurately.

The most important feature is that each line begins with a different colour than the line above or below. As Matthew Schneps, director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explained it to me, the colour gradients also pull our eyes long from i graphic symbol to the adjacent—and then from the terminate of ane line to the beginning of the next, minimizing any gamble of skipping lines or making anything less than an optimally efficient word-to-word or line-to-line transition.

Improving the ease and accuracy of the return sweep is a promising idea for readers of all skill levels. And withal it'due south one that's gone largely ignored in the milieu of media technologies. Today many of us read primarily on screens—and we have for years—yet most platforms have focused on using technology to attempt to recreate text as information technology appears in books (or in newspapers or magazines), instead of trying to create an optimal reading experience.

The format—black text on white lines of 12 to fifteen words of equal size—is a relic of the way that books were well-nigh hands printed on early press presses. It persists today out of tradition, not because of some innate tendency of the human brain to procedure information in this way.

Meanwhile, people who aren't peculiarly skilled at intake of text in the traditional format are systematically penalized. People who don't read well in this one particular fashion tend to fall backside scholastically early in life. They might be told they're not every bit bright as other people, or at least come up to assume information technology. They might even be diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, or a learning disability, or overlooked as academically mediocre.

"The book format was effective, simply not for anybody," said Schneps. "This is not just engineering that could aid people who are struggling with reading; this is technology that could help a lot of people."

* * *

Our minds are not as uniform equally our text. Nosotros all take in information in unlike means. Some people read more than quickly and retain more than information when lines are shorter, or when fonts are bolder, or in different colors. The color-gradient pattern above is rendered past a product called BeeLine, developed by armchair linguist Nick Lum. He got the idea later learning almost the Stroop Effect, the famous phenomenon where it becomes difficult to read words like "yellowish" and "reddish" when they are written in different colors. Lum thought, "What if instead of screwing people up, we tried to apply color in a mode that helps people?"

After he won the Stanford Social Entrepreneurship and Dell Education startup competitions with the idea in 2014, Lum took to developing the technology full time. Then far, the response from people tends to be binary: for some it's a shrug, but for others, particularly people with dyslexias, it's similar turning on a light bulb. Equally Lum describes it, people tell him "Holy moo-cow, this is how everybody else reads."

The idea has been well received by reading experts, too.

"Almost of the academic enquiry is figuring out entirely what your eyes are going to do on one line," said psychologist and Microsoft researcher Kevin Larson. "That has been such a challenge that it's rare for anyone to pay much attention to what happens during that line render movement."

At the University of Texas at Austin, Randolph Bias has studied the optimal length of lines of text for reading comprehension and speed. The 2 are more often than not at odds: Short lines make for a quick and accurate return (the movement is easier considering it allows our optics to accept a greater downward angle than if the line were longer.) The downside is that considering our brains process information during return sweeps, shorter lines don't afford the states that time. We also don't become to have total advantage of peripheral vision – which is key. (He cites this every bit the problem with Spritz, the reading applied science where single words apace wink before a reader.)

"Human beings have evolved to exist able to take in 12 to 16 messages—at least—at a fixation," Bias explained to me. This is known as our bridge of perception. "Just equally some people are taller, some people tin can take in more at a time."

And so, long lines of text are better if you can minimize line-transition bug. And using colour gradients seems to be one way to do that. Last twelvemonth, optometrist Carole Hong did an initial, small study (not peer-reviewed, for the company) where she watched the eye movements of people as they read with BeeLine, and most of them skipped fewer lines–and experienced fewer backward saccades–than when reading in blackness text.

"BeeLine gives the reader a cue every bit to where that next line is – an first-class, unavoidable cue," explained Bias. "I call up that's brilliant. Information technology might exist the kickoff in a series of creative ways we break out of traditional formats of text – where nosotros accept full advantage of online capabilities instead of but plopping a book into a doc file."

Beeline launched softly, accidentally, on the site Hacker News in 2013. At that point it was just a bookmarklet (the lamest version of a browser plugin), and the first version of the chrome extension. Fifty-fifty still, the concept captured enormous attending in the ADHD customs on Tumblr.

"Information technology wasn't envisioned as an assistive technology," said Lum, "merely after the launch on Hacker News, we got all kinds of emails from people with ADHD. The folks on Tumblr are heavily in the ADHD and dyslexia camps."

The color gradients might be helpful non but with render sweeps, merely simply in keeping people's attention – and then they're less likely to dart from tab to tab. Bias sees an important role for this applied science in the era of waning attending spans. He's 64 years one-time and describes himself as a "slow but skilful reader" who "can sometimes stay with something for a long time." But in recent years, he's sensed a decline in his attending, and has a feeling that this is a growing trouble. "Tin we multitask?" he asks, rhetorically. "The research, more than and more, shows that we all suck at it."

And as the definitions of paying attention and reading shift, narrowing the focus of technology like BeeLine to people with ADHD and dyslexia is missing the point. If changes in format like calculation color gradients can help prevent loss of attention, and then it necessarily helps with reading (retentiveness and speed). Schneps says that what'due south needed is a complete shift in thinking almost normalcy—and why in that location is one default state for almost all text.

At Microsoft in Seattle, for example, Larson has been working for 19 years studying word recognition and reading acquisition. When he started, he recalls, very few people would read any long certificate on screen. If they got a long e-mail, they would print it out. "Simply now," he notes, "that would be an outrageous affair to do."

The task at present is to make digital reading meliorate than reading in print. 1 of Larson'due south passions has been working to prove that we take in words not equally entities unto themselves (every bit some typographers have argued), but always by recognizing a word'due south component letters, and and so assembling them into words in our heads. His team also recently launched a new font that was designed for the all-time possible readability. Called Sitka, it went through a multistep, iterative blueprint-examination process. Each letter of the alphabet was changed and adjusted to maximize ease of reading – as opposed to most other fonts, which are made to mimic typefaces that existed in print media. "Times New Roman was designed to work very well with the engineering of the era," Laston explained. (I asked him if he has, then, created the most legible font in history. He said he "wouldn't go that far.")

It's not the color itself that's useful in Beeline, Larson believes, only the connection of the terminate of i line to the beginning of another. He suggests that for people who are colorblind or simply averse to the colored text, the same thing could be accomplished using bolder text or unlike fonts to draw people's eyes along. "A feature like Beeline can encourage people to move from print to digital," he said.

Indeed, many print media publications have struggled in recent years, but many persist—largely on the justification that people even so similar to sit back and hold a book or mag in their hands. But if the digital reading experience continues to meliorate—calculation value beyond mere portability—that could make analog reading always more niche.

The magazine CNET recently partnered with BeeLine to published two fiction pieces online, where readers had the option to plow the colors on or off. Jeremy Toeman, vice president of products at CNET, was instantly attracted to the applied science. "We're all spending more than and more than fourth dimension on screens, and getting tired of seeing blackness words on white backgrounds for hours and hours on end," he said, "so annihilation that helps with that seems good."

And the analytic data from the BeeLine trial at CNET suggests people like information technology. Readers who used the colour gradients were more than probable to read further down the page than people who didn't—and more likely to read to the terminate. Depth that they read down on the page was almost one-half-again as much as other readers.' In the world of digital media, this is not merely a valuable metric, but possibly the about valuable. This is the type of authentic audience engagement that's monetizable. Anyone tin can generate clicks; not many tin can hogtie people to read an entire article, when it is essentially competing for a person's attention against every other thing that'southward happening on the unabridged, enormous Internet.

As most of the earth'south readers move toward reading primarily on mobile devices, smaller screens hateful not just smaller text, but larger variations in ambient. The mobile reading environs is rarely as friendly every bit the desktop environment. You're non parked in a quiet part, but commuting on a subway that'south accelerating and decelerating, and your very small text is moving in 3 dimensions, and your eyes need to track across and between lines. That's much harder to do when you and the device are moving semi-independently.

"If we can become people to read more than, in this era where anybody is swiping through everything in a millisecond," Toeman said, "so I think that's bully applied science."

The other large opportunity for the technology is in educational settings. Later this year, BeeLine will be rolling out in libraries beyond California, equally part of a licensing partnership. This is how Lum sees the visitor growing. The basic Google Chrome extension and iPhone app are free. Merely big-scale licensing deals with platforms and institutions like school systems could be more lucrative—and make the option accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise recall to effort reading in colour.

In early experiments, some students do seem to do good from the color gradients. Final year, first-class students in two full general-didactics classrooms in San Bernardino, California, tried out Beeline, and many did better with comprehension tests afterword. "Because of my background in visual processing, I immediately wanted to check it out," said Michael Dominguez, an applied behavioral analyst who directs the San Bernardino school district'south special education plan. "Based on everything I know, it should work cracking."

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