Reading is Unnatural

WE’RE WIRED FOR LANGUAGE, BUT NOT FOR

READING
• Speaking and understanding spoken language is a natural human
ability, but reading is not.
• By adolescence, learning a new language is the same as learning any
other skill: it requires instruction and practice, and the learning and
processing are handled by different brain areas from those that
handled it in early childhood
• In contrast, writing and reading did not exist until a few thousand
years BCE and did not become common until only four or five
centuries ago—long after the human brain had evolved into its
modern state.
Many people never learn to read well, or at
all
Learning to read = training our visual system
• Learning to read involves training our visual system to recognize
patterns—the patterns exhibited by text.
• Actually, only part of our visual system is trained to recognize textual
patterns involved in reading: the fovea and a small area immediately
surrounding it (known as the perifovea), and the downstream neural
networks running through the optic nerve to the visual cortex and
into various parts of our brain. The neural networks starting
elsewhere in our retinas do not get trained to read.
• Learning to read also involves training the brain’s systems that control
eye movement to move our eyes in a specific way over text. The main
direction of eye movement depends on the direction in which the
language we are reading is written.
• European language scripts are read left to right, many middle Eastern
language scripts are read right to left, and some language scripts are
read top to bottom.
• Beyond that, the precise eye movements differ depending on
whether we are reading, skimming for overall meaning, or scanning
for specific words.
How we read
• Assuming our visual system and brain have successfully been trained,
reading becomes semi-automatic or fully automatic—both the eye
movement and the processing.
• The center of our visual field—the fovea and perifovea—is the only
part of our visual field that is trained to read.
• When we read, we may feel that our eyes scan smoothly across the
lines of text, but that feeling is incorrect. In reality, our eyes continue
with saccades during reading, but the movements generally follow
the line of text.
• They fix our fovea on a word, pause there for a fraction of a second to
allow basic patterns to be captured and transmitted to the brain for
further analysis, and then jump to the next important word (Larson,
2004)
• Eye fixations while reading always land on words, usually near the
center, never on word boundaries.
• Very common small connector and function words like “a,” “and,”
“the,” “or,” “is,” and “but” are usually skipped over, their presence
either detected in perifoveal vision or simply assumed.
• Most of the saccades during reading are in the text’s normal reading
direction, but a few— about 10%—jump backwards to previous
words.
• At the end of each line of text, our eyes jump to where our brain
guesses the next line begins.
How much can we take in during each eye
fixation during reading?
• For reading European-language scripts at normal reading distances
and text-font sizes, the fovea clearly sees 3–4 characters on either
side of the fixation point.
• The perifovea sees out about 15–20 characters from the fixation
point, but not very clearly
• Because our visual system has been trained to read, perception
around the fixation point is asymmetrical: it is more sensitive to
characters in the reading direction than in the other direction.
IS READING FEATURE-DRIVEN OR CONTEXT-
DRIVEN?
• In feature-driven reading, the visual system starts by identifying
simple features— line segments in a certain orientation or curves of a
certain radius—on a page or display, and then combines them into
more complex features, such as angles, multiple curves, shapes, and
patterns.
• Feature-driven reading is sometimes referred to as “bottom-up” or
“context-free.” The brain’s ability to recognize basic features—lines,
edges, angles, etc.—is built in and therefore automatic from birth.
• In contrast, recognition of morphemes, words, and phrases has to be
learned. It starts out as a nonautomatic, conscious process requiring
conscious analysis of letters, morphemes, and words, but with
enough practice it becomes automatic.
• Obviously, the more common a morpheme, word, or phrase, the
more likely that recognition of it will become automatic.
• Context-driven or top-down reading operates in parallel with feature-
driven reading but it works the opposite way: from whole sentences or the
gist of a paragraph down to the words and characters.
• The visual system starts by recognizing highlevel patterns like words,
phrases, and sentences, or by knowing the text’s meaning in advance.
• It then uses that knowledge to figure out—or guess—what the
components of the high-level pattern must be (Boulton, 2009).
• Context-driven reading is less likely to become fully automatic because
most phrase-level and sentence-level patterns and contexts don’t occur
frequently enough to allow their recognition to become burned into neural
firing patterns. But there are exceptions, such as idiomatic expressions.
• To experience context-driven reading,
• Also, based on what we have already read and our knowledge of the
world, our brains can sometimes predict text that the fovea has not
yet read (or its meaning), allowing us to skip reading it
• Feature-driven, bottom-up reading dominates; context assists
• Similarly, educational researchers in the 1970s applied information
theory to reading, and assumed that because of redundancies in
written language, top-down, context-driven reading would be faster
than bottom-up, feature-driven reading.
• This assumption led them to hypothesize that reading for highly
skilled (fast) readers would be dominated by context-driven (top-
down) processing.
• Skilled readers may resort to context-based reading when feature-
based reading is disrupted by poor presentation of information (see
examples later in this chapter). Also, in the race between context-
based and feature-based reading to decipher the text we see,
contextual cues sometimes win out over features.
• As an example of context-based reading, Americans visiting England
sometimes misread “to let” signs as “toilet,” because in the United
States they see the word “toilet” often, but they almost never see the
phrase “to let”—Americans use “for rent” instead.
POOR INFORMATION DESIGN CAN DISRUPT
READING
• Careless writing or presentation of text can reduce skilled readers’
automatic, context-free reading to conscious, context-based reading,
burdening working memory, thereby decreasing speed and
comprehension. In unskilled readers, poor text presentation can block
reading altogether
Uncommon or unfamiliar vocabulary
Difficult scripts and typefaces
• Even when the vocabulary is familiar, reading can be disrupted by
typefaces with unfamiliar or hard-to-distinguish shapes.
Tiny fonts
• Another way to make text hard to read in software applications,
websites, and electronic appliances is to use fonts that are too small
for their intended readers’ visual system to resolve
Text on noisy background
• Visual noise in and around text can disrupt recognition of features,
characters, and words, and therefore drop reading out of automatic
feature-based mode into a more conscious and context-based mode
• In software user interfaces and websites, visual noise often results
from designers’ placing text over a patterned background or
displaying text in colors that contrast poorly with the background,
The Federal Reserve Bank’s online mortgage calculator
displayed text on a patterned background.
Centered text
• One aspect of reading that is highly automatic in most skilled readers
is eye movement. In automatic (fast) reading, our eyes are trained to
go back to the same horizontal position and down one line. If text is
centered or right-aligned, each line of text starts in a different
horizontal position. Automatic eye movements, therefore, take our
eyes back to the wrong place, so we must consciously adjust our gaze
to the actual start of each line. This drops us out of automatic mode
and slows us down greatly.
Design implications: Don’t disrupt reading;
support it!
• Obviously, a designer’s goal should be to support reading, not disrupt
it.
• Skilled (fast) reading is mostly automatic and mostly based on feature,
character, and word recognition. The easier the recognition, the
easier and faster the reading. Less skilled reading, by contrast, is
greatly assisted by contextual cue
Designers of interactive systems can support both
reading methods by following these guidelines:
• 1) Ensure that text in user interfaces allows the feature-based
automatic processes to function effectively by avoiding the disruptive
flaws described earlier: difficult or tiny fonts, patterned backgrounds,
centering, etc.
• 2) Use restricted, highly consistent vocabularies—sometimes referred
to in the industry as plain language4 or simplified language (Redish,
2007).
• 3) Format text to create a visual hierarchy (see Chapter 3) to facilitate
easy scanning: use headings, bulleted lists, tables, and visually
emphasized words.
MUCH OF THE READING REQUIRED BY
SOFTWARE IS UNNECESSARY
• In addition to committing design mistakes that disrupt reading, many
software user interfaces simply present too much text, requiring users
to read more than is necessary. Consider how much unnecessary text
there is in a dialog box for setting text entry properties in the
SmartDraw application.
• Software designers often justify lengthy instructions by arguing: “We
need all that text to explain clearly to users what to do.” However,
instructions can often be shortened with no loss of clarity.
Design implications: Minimize the need for
reading
• Too much text in a user interface loses poor readers, who
unfortunately are a significant percentage of the population. Too
much text even alienates good readers: it turns using an interactive
system into an intimidating amount of work.
• Minimize the amount of prose text in a user interface; don’t present
users with long blocks of prose text to read.
• In instructions, use the least amount of text that gets most users to
their intended goals.
TEST ON REAL USERS
• Finally, designers should test their designs on the intended user
population to be confident that users can read all essential text
quickly and effortlessly.
• Some testing can be done early, using prototypes and partial
implementations, but it should also be done just before release.
• Fortunately, last-minute changes to text font sizes and formats are
usually easy to make.