Why Text in All Caps is Hard for Users to Read

http://uxmovement.com/design-articles/all-caps-hard-for-users-to-read

by UXMovement • 16 years ago

85 29 16 years ago

The vertical edge shape contrast has also been noted to have an effect on comprehension (as in ragged right vs full justification). A few resources/papers:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.1986.... http://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/ragged-right-or-jus... http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_...

Tyrannosaurs• 16 years ago

I remember learning about this at university.

The TL;DR version for those who don't want to bother with the links:

Full justification creates "rivers" of white space (effectively spaces above and below that partially line up forming a white line snaking down part of the page).

The eye has a tendency to follow these down the page which leads to either skim reading (you just resume reading where the river stops) or having to go back and reread and not get caught by the river this time.

Either obviously compromise the information you're taking in.

justinph• 16 years ago

Sometimes it is OK to use all caps. This is pointed out in the article, but worth noting again. You might want your text to read more as a shape. For instance, when using section headers that you want to be more uniform in appearance.

keyle• 16 years ago

I wonder though if this applies to languages like chinese or japanese. I know nothing about them but I'm pretty sure CAPS don't get any bigger. Does that make the language harder to comprehend?

I would have liked a more in-depth analysis personally.

harisenbon2• 16 years ago

How do you mean how this applies to languages like chinese and Japanese? Do you mean that Japanese and Chinese have capital letter, or are you referring to english letters written in all caps read by a native Japanese/Chinese speaker?

In Japan(I don't know about china) it is very common for english words to be written in all caps when surrounded by Japanese characters. they will also (in many cases) be written in full-spaced letters, which only have capital versions: ＡＢＣＤＥ vs ABCDE. I've never seen it cause a problem, but I think this is more because Japanese speakers are not native english speakers, so their hesitation with an unfamiliar script would outweigh any recognition delay from it being written in all caps.

However, I do know that sentences that are written purely in katakana are much slower for native speakers to read, as it's a script that is used much less than kanji or hiragana. I would hesitate to say that reading an all-katakana sentence is more troublesome for a native jp speaker than a native english speaker reading something written in all caps.

spazmaster• 16 years ago

Japanese is a language with three alphabets, theres not much room for comparison when talking about All Caps. These three alphabets can all be used in the same sentence. Readability for Japanese is a whole different science. They have their own fonts, no all caps, characters comprised of 30 individual strokes, top-to-bottom-right-to-left writing, but also horizontal reading.

One of the biggest readability issues for Japanese would be which characters are used would be my guess. You need to know 2000 characters before you can start reading the newspaper.

As an English person we can read every word, but might not know the meaning of sparingly used words. In Japanese you might nit even be able to read it, or you might even misread it. (characters can be read differently based on the character next to it)

By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences, since it's just used for the 'imported' words.

riobard• 16 years ago

Since there is no concept of CAPS in Chinese, I assume you mean that Chinese and Japanese characters are more or less square-shaped (thus less "shape contrast" from the linked article), are they harder to read? The answer is probably no for natives, but yes if you are used to latin-based languages.

One thing to note though is that there are so-called half-width and full-width symbols in most Chinese fonts (I think it's the same in CJK, but not very sure).

These are half-width symbols (normal symbols):

1234567890 ALL CAPS sucks

There are full-width counterparts (if your system and display them):

１２３４５６７８９０ＡＬＬＣＡＰＳ　ｓｕｃｋｓ

Half-width and full-width chars get their names due to the fact in a monospace Chinese font, two half-width chars will take the same space as one full-width char. This makes alignment easier.

By now it's pretty safe to say using full-width chars is a bad idea. The readability is so low and mixed Chinese and English content is so common that people don't tolerate the ugly full-width chars any more. The norm right now seems to mix monospace Chinese glyphs (all Chinese chars have same width) with proportional latin glyphs. Unfortunately most Chinese fonts come with really ugly latin glyphs, and the remedy is to specify a latin font first (Arial and Verdana are the two most popular choices) and fallback to some Chinese font.

nhebb• 16 years ago

All Caps is also hard to read because you spend your whole life reading sentence case. Its what we've trained our brains to look at and interpret.

One plus for All Caps: it makes filtering piles of resumes easier. If it's written in All Caps I toss it without reading.

trafficlight• 16 years ago

You're doing yourself a disservice. As we all know, caps lock is cruise control for cool. All you're doing is throwing out the resumes of A-listers.

kingkawn• 16 years ago

I remember reading a long time ago that teens read all caps more attentively than regular text. not sure if its true though.

aperiodic• 16 years ago

This article presumes the word-shape model if reading, which most reading psychologists believe to be inaccurate. The parallel-letter recognition article has the most experimental support. This paper by a reading psychologist at Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/wordrecognition....) has a good summary of the models and experimental evidence.

scott_s2• 16 years ago

This is an excellent overview of the evidence for the various models of reading. It is far better than the parent article. Submit it on its own!

luxative• 16 years ago

HoPe pEoPle DoN't sTaRt WrItInG lIkE ThIs nOw

bbk• 16 years ago

was going to write same thing. Contrast isn't everything.

edanm• 16 years ago

I've been interested in the caps issue for a while. I'm a native Hebrew speaker, and Hebrew doesn't have the idea of Capital letters - there is only one set.

I wonder why caps were even important. I mean, it's just another set of the same letters, what's it for?

After a while, I did find some uses for it. Namely, when reading books, if you come across a name you don't recognize (say, the name of a person), in Hebrew you can't tell that it's a name; for all you know, it's a word that you don't recognize and not a name.

blahedo• 16 years ago

It dates to the medieval copyists---mostly monks---who developed new ways of writing that were faster. In some cases the letters connected (what we'd call cursive), sometimes just flowed (italic), sometimes they were just shorter and rounder (uncial/half-uncial). The dominant form was this new style. BUT, for the beginnings of chapters and/or pages, they would revert to the old Latin letters, often with a great deal of decoration. Thus the capitals remained in active use even as the running text evolved. The printing press narrowed the number of distinct styles somewhat, but even today if you look at handwriting across Europe, the capitals are pretty recognisable and would look familiar to an ancient Roman, but the rest of the text diverges a lot.

...which doesn't exactly answer your question of what it's "for", I guess. But to some extent, we have two cases because that's what history gave us, and now we make use of them as best we can.

ugh• 16 years ago

I think the existence of capitals has more to do with history and less with utility. As you said, it’s not obvious why you would need capitals.

The Romans started with nothing but what we today know as capitals [1] (imported from elsewhere but that is another story). Everyone who needs to write a lot and fast (e.g. merchants) will optimize the letters for this purpose and thus dramatically change how the letters look. That’s how the Romans got their cursive [2]. If, on the other hand, your task is to chisel letters into stone or copy a book you can be extra diligent, an opportunity to clean up letterforms [3].

Those two writing styles – cursive and capitals – were not intended to be combined with each other. It’s only later, in medieval times, that both letterforms are used together [4].

[1] Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hermes_16_illustration1.pn...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive

[3] Square Capitals, example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arch.of.Titus-Inscription.... – Uncial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncial_script

[4] Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minuscule_caroline.jpg

dochtman• 16 years ago

In this context, the German use of caps is interesting. They capitalize every noun, and I believe that such a use has been proven to allow for speedier reading than the capital use in other Western languages (i.e. English).

rkowalick• 16 years ago

It still does not prevent the possibility of coming across an unfamiliar word that ends up being a person or place's name.

Gormo• 16 years ago

It was common until the 19th century to capitalize all nouns in English as well.

I've found in reading older text that it doesn't noticeably affect the speed of comprehension, but the capitalization of nouns does seem to subtly shift the emphasis away from the action being described by the sentence and toward the things taking part in it.

india• 16 years ago

Hindi doesn't have capital letters either. I think we recognize a name more by it's context than the case of the first letter. If I found a hindi word I didn't recognize, I would still be able to tell if it were a name or not. Perhaps caps exist for purely stylistic reasons.

I wonder what would happen if someone did a design study of showing all caps vs sentence case text to people who have never seen English. Wonder which one would they say looks better.

c00p3r• 16 years ago

It is just a bit harder to recognize words written in caps.

When we're reading, we aren't recognizing each character and then combining them unconsciously into a word and then you comprehend it. We just recognize the words at once, and stops on an unfamiliar or out of context ones, which usually signals a misreading.

So, people are using caps when they need to EMPHASIZE something. ^_^

This article is trying to emphasize that the author cold understand things, that the rest of the world cannot. ^_^

bartl• 16 years ago

I wonder why they're not saying anything about title case (Like the Title of This Post). Man!

adolfojp• 16 years ago

i have no problem with all caps. what really annoys me is when people don't use proper capitalization at the beginning of a sentence. what really makes me angry is when people defend this style with the "e. e. cummings used to do it" excuse. i can't parse paragraphs like these.

ladeniran• 16 years ago

The educational social systems we have train us to become better used to reading words in sentence case. I'm yet to see a study on little kids struggling to read in all caps before anything else. Give us something on this before concluding...

ny51bern• 16 years ago

I use caps when I am trying to stress or emphasize a point. Sometimes caps are easier to see on the eyes as well.

Why Text in All Caps is Hard for Users to Read

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