Hi Alan
I note your comment that: 'People also read more quickly from paper rather
than screen'
I've very interested to know more that this. Do you have a source I could
refer to?
One factoid to add to it - and I'm afraid this is something I read a long
time ago and cannot remember the source - is that an eye-tracking study
showed that when reading print newspapers people look at the pictures before
they look at the text, but online, because pictures take longer to load,
they look at the text first.
Re the *way* people look at the text, it's interesting to see that many
layouts use only the centre column, so the eye doesn't have to scan across
the whole page. Again, studies I cannot confirm seem to suggest that in
print people generally only read down the middle of the page anyway, so the
online version seems to have learned from that.
But generally, re speed of reading, I'd be interested to hear more about that.
One thing i can confirm as a pda user is that speed of accessing a given
date and time in one's diary is excruciatingly and embarrassingly slow
compared to the dog-eared black black book!
Sue
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