Studies show that reading from a computer screen is about 30% slower than reading from paper (Nielsen, 1995, p. 154). Screen reading presents difficulties for the following reasons:
Screen resolution is low as compared to printed material.
Screen glare can impair reading.
Letters on a computer screen appear coarse to the eye.
Partly due to this problem, Jakob Nielsen states, Web users do not read long blocks of text carefully or thoroughly (Allstetter, 1998). "Screen resolution is too low, too coarse, so the letters don't feel smooth to the eye," he says. "That slows down the eye when it tries to read the text."
Screen reading can cause eyestrain.
Since screens are smaller, granier, and more glaring than hardcopy, reading online can cause eyestrain (Horton, 1994, p. 11).
Processing text online requires spatial and relational processing
abilities.
Thus, designers need to consider rhetorical issues differently than they would for conventional texts (Wenger & Payne, 1996).
Screen size can be smaller than a page of printed material.
Desktop computers are not portable and can be less convenient
to use than printed material.
All too often, documents that were never designed for the screen
are simply dumped online.
This common pitfall can make documents unreadable and inaccessible to readers (Schriver, 1997).
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Last Updated: May 2, 2001
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