thoughtcrumbs

Low-literacy web users "plow" through text

Oh, goody. This week's Alertbox is about web page use by those with low literacy levels, which is exactly what my NSF proposal was about. Maybe the committee will give me bonus points for being au courant. Nielsen finds that, while people with strong reading skills can glance over sections and glean meaning quickly, people struggling to read must attend to each individual word, narrowing their field of focus and making them lose concentration whenever scrolling is needed. Given that a quarter of Americans cannot read a food label and another quarter cannot solve problems requiring basic integration of written information*, complicated websites marginalize a huge population.

Simplifying text, prioritizing menu items, streamlining layout, and accommodating spelling errors in search all improve sites for low-literacy users, which Pfizer demonstrated in a site redesign. Like most accessibility improvements, the changes benefited high-literacy users, as well.

*Stats from the National Institute for Literacy.