Screen reading

Screen reading is the act of reading a text on a computer screen, smartphone, e-book reader, etc. It is often contrasted with the act of reading a text on paper, in particular a printed text.

Louis Émile Javal, a French ophthalmologist and founder of an ophthalmology laboratory in Paris is credited with the introduction of the term saccades into eye movement research. Javal discovered that while reading, one’s eyes tend to jump across the text in saccades, and stop intermittently along each line in fixations.

Because of the lack of technology at the time, naked-eye observations were used to observe eye movement, until later in the late 19th and mid-20th century eye-tracking experiments were conducted in an attempt to discover a pattern regarding eye fixations while reading.

In a 1997 study conducted by Jakob Nielsen, a leading web usability expert who co-founded usability consulting company Nielsen Norman Group with Donald Norman, it was discovered that generally people read 25% slower on a computer screen in comparison with a printed page. The researchers state that this is only true for when reading on an older type computer screen with a low-scanrate.

In an additional study done in 2006, Nielsen also discovered that people read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern that consists of two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. He had 232 participants fitted with eye-tracking cameras to trace their eye movements as they read online texts and webpages. The findings showed that people do not read the text on webpages word-by-word, but instead generally read horizontally across the top of the webpage, then in a second horizontal movement slightly lower on the page, and lastly scan vertically down the left side of the screen.

The Software Usability Research Laboratory at Wichita State University did a subsequent study in 2007 testing eye gaze patterns while searching versus browsing a website [1], and the results confirmed that users appeared to follow Nielsen’s ‘F’ pattern while browsing and searching through text-based pages.

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