Thursday, August 18, 2005
Online Readability
Here's a rather unusual gripe for this blog. Why is it that so much effort it placed into online documents without taking into consideration the online presentation. Often, a document designed for print is simply converted to an online document, and if lucky a few links tossed in, then it's published online with no further work. It often seems, and I've seen this even in organizations dedicated to technical writing, that no consideration of what a reader sees is kept in mind. Following are a few of the most common things I've seen.
This low level stuff is thankfully not too common (common enough however) with professionally produced material. Colors and contrasts - many a document has dark print that fades into a multicolored background to the point where the letters can hardly be made out. Font size - while I can read pretty small print, some stuff is almost literally too small to be seen. Not all of your readers are under thirty. On the other hand, too large isn't good either. Format overload - just because you can bold, underline, emphasize, italicize, multicolorize and multisize, doesn't mean you should.
Overall page layout is what really gripes me though. I just read an article about publishing online on a site about good service and the width isn't adjustable. The space for text is 600 pixels across. If you narrow your window, the right-hand side is hidden, and if you expand your window the right-hand side is whitespace. What is even worse is when the right margin isn't there. I've seen text that was 255 characters wide or more - not good. Newspapers have multiple narrow columns for a reason - it makes the text easier to read. Too wide isn't good. It slows a reader down by making them take multiple scans across a page.
However some layouts try to fix this by making multiple columns on a page. While this is fine for a newspaper, it sucks online. I think what normally happens is that someone writes a paper doc, then makes it into a PDF and pushes it online without giving a thought to how it will appear on screen. Very rarely can you get a whole page on screen at once. Because of banners, ads, logos, links and what-have-you, the bottom part of the page is usually off-screen. Which means that you have to read, scroll the page, and when the bottom of the column is reached, scroll back up the top and start again. The International Herald Tribune is an online document that does handle multiple columns extremely well. The Society for Technical Communications of all organizations is one who doesn't handle multiple columns well, as this document shows.
If you have a multisection article that has links that go to the next section - make the links all appear in the same place. That way I can read, click and continue, without having to spend time looking for where the "next" link is. And if that's not possible, at least make sure the link appear in the same horizontal location. That way while I have to scroll (mouse scroll wheels are great for online reading) down, I can at least leave the mouse in the same place to click.
Underline links and don't underline nonlinks. <U> </U> has no place in online writing unless it links to something. If you really need an additional layer of emphasis, try using a different font size or face or color. I am too conditioned to see as a link online to change now.
Obviously, there's more but this will help me a lot when trying to read your online documents. And no, this blog doesn't always follow a lot of this - this is my fun writing venue with minimal editing and few worries about formatting.
