- From: Mark Barratt <markb@textmatters.com>
- Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 18:07:58 +0000
- To: Olaf Drümmer <olaf@druemmer.com>
- Cc: Joe Chidzik <joe.chidzik@abilitynet.org.uk>, Oscar Cao <oscar.cao@live.com>, "w3c-wai-ig@w3.org" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
- Message-Id: <34BC8931-97E8-4E2E-B3D5-10B4F73BD03B@textmatters.com>
Good point, Olaf. Your hypothesis (which I think is that, say, an all-caps nav panel in an otherwise conventionally-cased web page would be significantly slower to search/read that the same panel in upper & lower) would also apply to the only other research I know of into all-caps labels, which was conducted as part of the UK’s road signage redesign. That found very little significant difference. The road signs, as you’ll know if you have driven in the UK, ended up upper & lower case, mainly because they that was thought to be ‘modern’ and the UK in the 1950s was very keen to be modern. So, given that neither research proving upper-lower is better, not research showing that all-upper is better, is relevant to the use-case, we had better settle for ‘don’t know’ until we do. > On 21 Nov 2014, at 16:00, Olaf Drümmer <olaf@druemmer.com> wrote: > > 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. > -- Mark Barratt Text Matters We help explain things using design | language | systems | process improvement markb@textmatters.com | +44 (0)118 986 8313 http://www.textmatters.com | Twitter @mark_barratt | Skype mark_barratt
Received on Friday, 21 November 2014 18:09:17 UTC