Color Can Affect Ease of Reading - Page 2

I recently wrote a column on readability in which I said that the best color combination for reading is what most people are used to seeing — black type on a white background. That, in most cases, is true. However, it apparently is not always the case.

An e-mail received from Laurie Knight, the webmaster for AXLPerformance Solutions in the London, England, area, gave one example when it is not true.

Mr. Knight wrote: "I used to think that black on white was the best/most readable colour combination, until I developed a Web site for someone with dyslexia, and I found out that black/white is the worst combination for dyslexics.

"The contrast makes it unreadable for them, you have to tweak either the white or the black so the contrast isn't so extreme."

That just proves that there are always exceptions to even the best of rules. In that particular instance, one solution is to set up the site so that users can choose the background color, text color, the font, and other elements that are easiest for them to see.

For many, a font featuring wide letter spacing and line spacing is best. Number lists are preferable to bullet lists because they offer readers more reference points to help them maintain reading flow.

However, the most obvious solution is that Internet Explorer, Netscape, and many other leading browsers allow users to go to the preferences settings and choose the fonts and colors they wish to see, overriding the designer's choices.

Designers will also have people seeing their pages who are color blind. Depending on whose statistics you use, somewhere between 6-8 percent of all people are color blind, and most have greater difficulty when red and green are used together.

Other things to do to help the reader is to avoid using differing shades of the same color — they often come across to some people as the same color — and underline all links.

Mouseovers are a problem for some people to decipher, and image maps only work for some if the clickable areas feature either underlined text or a dark outline.

Text in color is most often annoying and, if the colors are not carefully chosen, can be difficult for anyone to read. Darker colors are frequently the best choice, but designers need to make sure there is sufficient contrast from the background color.

Perhaps it is impossible to design a site that works for everyone, but designers should consider their most likely audience when building a site and make the appropriate accommodations.

If nothing else, a text-only alternative page is the easiest solution.

The good, the bad, and the really ugly

This is personal taste, but here are a few samples of text and color background that work, don't work, and that are just so ugly they should not even be attempted. Please note that not all of these are Web-safe colors, simply because they are real examples chosen from the Internet:

The Good The text is easily read	The Bad The text is difficult to read	The Really Ugly It makes ugly look good
Black on White	White on Black (But I like it!)	Pink on Red
Black on Light Blue	Black on Dark Blue	Red on ugly Green
Black on Silver	White on Light Silver	Red on Light Blue
Black on Light Yellow	Gray on Black	Dark Gold on Black
Burgundy on Light Yellow	Anything on this shade of Green	Dark Green on Medium Green
Navy on Medium Blue	Yellow on White	Pink on Brown

For those classified as easy to read, they all have one thing in common: excellent contrast. Those difficult to read most often lack contrast or can seemingly cause migraines in large doses, and the ugly choices are, well, ugly.

Also note that the yellow on white is a combination that tends to make the type appear blurred, adding the reading difficulty. That is a common result of pairing colors that are similar in shade.

This is just a sample of each. There are, of course, thousands of combinations for each of the categories above.

Using Color on the Internet
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