Design Guidelines for Web Readability

Abstract

Reading is fundamental to interactive-system use, but around 800 million of people might struggle with it due to literacy difficulties. Few websites are designed for high readability, as readability remains an underinvestigated facet of User Experience. Existing readability guidelines have multiple issues: they are too many or too generic, poorly worded, and often lack cognitive grounding. This paper developed a set of 61 readability guidelines in a series of workshops with design and dyslexia experts. A user study with dyslexic and average readers further narrowed the 61-guideline set down to a core set of 12 guidelines-an acceptably small set to keep in mind while designing. The core-set guidelines address reformatting-such as using larger fonts and narrower content columns, or avoiding underlining and italics-and may well aply to the interactive system other than websites.

The Impact of Web Browser Reader Views on Reading Speed and User Experience

“…The column on the right indicates whether and how the Firefox Reader View applies these guidelines. * [35] summarized previous research and suggested to avoid formatting texts in large-width columns, which contradicts the other two work cited. for people with visual impairments) [36].…”

“…Differences in readers' skills and text comprehension are a result of multiple factors, such as working memory capacity [11], wordidentification and comprehension skills [21], and age, which was shown to negatively correlate with reading speed. For example, older subjects (aged 65-75) read significantly slower than younger subjects (aged [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] [40] with people's reading speed decreasing between 20 and 88 years of age from 103 to 76 words per minute (WPM) [50]. Lott et al demonstrated a similar decline in reading speed between ages 58 to 102 [29].…”

“…Prior work has developed design guidelines for improving on-screen and website readability through better text presentation for average readers and people with dyslexia (see Table 1). For instance, Miniukovich et al have developed 8 core design guidelines to improve website readability for people with dyslexia, such as by using larger fonts, narrower columns, and avoiding underlining and italics [35]. Many of these guidelines are based on prior work that evaluated how text readability is affected by font properties (e.g.…”

What Is Known About the Impact of Impairments on Information Seeking and Searching?

“…Other related research within the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) may be applied to explore these issues further, and there is a substantial amount of work to build on; for instance, guidelines on web accessibility and web readability (Miniukovich, Angeli, Sulpizio, & Venuti, ; Santana, Oliveira, Almeida, Cec, & Baranauskas, ; Venturini & Gena, ), using games to improve spelling skills (Rello, Bayarri, Otal, & Pielot, ), and including people with dyslexia in the development teams (González, ). Based on the existing research, it seems purposeful to explore these issues further, since spelling correction and string‐matching methods might reduce the impact of spelling errors in an information searching context.…”

Effects of Highlighting Text on the Reading Ability of Children with Developmental Dyslexia: A Pilot Study

“…Miniukovich, De Angeli, and Sulpizio, et al conducted a review of Web readability guidelines. A user study with dyslexic and average readers reduced the 61-guideline set to a core of 12 guidelines; the guideline for text color was: "Use an off-white color for your background, like light gray or tan; use dark gray for text instead of pure black" [13]. That study also suggested that dyslexics' readability issues differed from the readability issues of average readers.…”