RE: Feedback

Another good reason to not use all capital letters is that the screen
readers will read text to what they think it will read.  For example, if
your website has the wording CONTACT US if a person using a screen reader
accesses it, they will hear Contact U.S. (acronym for United States). 

 

Judy

 

From: Olaf Drümmer [mailto:olaf@druemmer.com] 
Sent: November-21-14 11:00 AM
To: Joe Chidzik
Cc: Olaf Drümmer; Mark Barratt; Oscar Cao; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Feedback

 

 

On 21 Nov 2014, at 16:41, Joe Chidzik <joe.chidzik@abilitynet.org.uk> wrote:





>(it just slows down reading and increases error rate while reading). 

 

Whilst I’ve always thought that this is the case for large blocks of text,
can you cite a source\research for this?

 

I learnt all this when I went to university in the eighties studying
psychology. I'd have to dig out the sources (but won;t have the bandwidth to
do this right away).

 

Just one bit everybody seems to overlook when arguing that these pieces of
text - like entries in a navigation menu or button labels - are short, and
thus the rules valid for longer pieces of text don't apply: a typical web
user will read lots of text while consuming a web page, and navigation items
or button labels etc. are just portions of a large amount of text that is
taken in.   This is a situation completely different from looking at a
comparably small number of labels on a washing machine, or maybe even in a
fast jet's cockpit (and in the latter case: a 'user' in a fast jet's cockpit
would typically not read all the labels to be found in the cockpit, but will
typically have to identify a label that was expected to be present, or has
to validate that a label belongs to an instrument that was expected.

 

 

Olaf