Re: Length of line

I cannot remember how this figure was reached but here is some more information on the subject and it depends very much on font size and spacing.

In the book 'Dyslexia in the Digital Age' Ian Smythe offers some research suggesting 45-55 characters but qualifies it with the amount of extra scrolling needed in terms of reading speed. http://tinyurl.com/jra7hk3.


Luz Rello (http://www.luzrello.com/Publications_files/uais2015.pdf) mentions 44-66 characters as a preference in her paper for both general readers and those with Dyslexia.

http://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/dyslexia-typography/.  Mention of shorter lines on mobile technologies to speed reading but not justified text  (16-18 characters per line)

Hope that helps.

Best wishes
E.A.
Sent from my mobile phone

On 10 Jan 2017, at 21:33, David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca<mailto:david100@sympatico.ca>> wrote:

I'm the manager of Issue #57 line length.

https://github.com/w3c/wcag21/issues/57


I was asked to explain why 25 characters was chosen as the threshold. I deferred to the LVTF
​ since I did not write that requirement​
. One point that was mentioned was that 25 characters is about the width of most news article columns.

I did a survey of several top news sites on the web and measured the length of characters when text size is 100% (no zoom)

-CNN 74
​ ​
characters without counting spaces 87 with spaces. could narrow to 35 (w/ spaces) in Responsive
-NBC 61 no spaces 73 with spaces, could narrow to 39 (w/ spaces)
-ABC NEWS 81 no spaces 92 Spaces, could narrow to 43 in responsive
-FoxNews 67 no space 79 spaces could narrow to 45 in responsive
-Le Droit french 74 no space, 86 with spaces, no responsive
-Google News 73 No Spaces 87 with spaces could narrow to 44 in responsive
- Huff post French 67 no spaces 79 with spaces no responsive

​N
one of these sites passed the new SC proposal of 25 characters. They all went to horizontal scroll when window was narrowed less than those
​minimum character ​
widths shown above.

​Do we
 want to make the minimum a little wider, say 45 or 50 characters.

For reference, the following is about 25 characters:

"This test assesses basic"



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David MacDonald



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Received on Tuesday, 10 January 2017 22:24:12 UTC