Ragged vs right-aligned justification
Keybounce
Posts: 474 ✭✭✭
Messages in this forum are forced into right-side justification.
For me, this makes it harder to read.
(And, from the studies I've read, it's harder for more than half the population.)
Please either make it jagged, or make it a user-selected option.
The offending CSS:
.Section-Discussion .Message {
text-align: justify;
}
0
Comments
There are two things here, Keybounce.
First, is this a general forum issue or is it the browser you are using? On my phone, this forum always shows left-aligned, not right.
Secondly, I think the team have limited control over the forum settings, as it is a reskin of existing forum software, not their own coding.
That is from the css file that comes with each page of messages.
I'm surprised you're saying it's right-aligned. On my mobile and laptop, it's left-aligned. I've never seen it right-aligned.
Same here. Left-aligned. Can you post a screenshot? @Keybounce
Edit: apologies. I included a screenshot of a post from this forum, and it kind of blends in and looks like its own separate post. Sorry if it looks confusing at all.
I'm not sure if this is what @Keybounce meant, but the forum actually (for me, at least) aligns to both margins. Since the majority of paragraphs are 1 or 2 lines, it's not obvious until you come across a longer one. Even then, it sometimes does a good job of spacing out the words so the justification is not obvious. I definitely see it when a line has to be stretched awkwardly to fit the margins, as in the 2nd line of @Magpie31's final paragraph.
It is visually irritating when a line has to stretched awkwardly, but in the end that's all it is. If there's not an easy fix, it's not really worth worrying much about it.
I've had a look at this and made a comparison of what the Forum currently does and what @Keybounce suggests / wants - with Red Boxes to show where the picture ends.
Current State:
Suggested State:
My thoughts:
Personally I like the "block text" more as my eyes and my brain is used to reading books with block-text. Whenever a line is not in block text my brain assumes that the line is a separate paragraph - just without a separating linefeed between them. And the "non-justify"-version confuses my brain.
I now understand! So it is justified, not right aligned. For me, justified is generally nicer.
For reference, this is right aligned, and why I was confused!
Pretty much all books I own are written in a justified text-alignment:
Also, I would be very interested to read the studies that suggest more than 50% of the population find justified harder to read. Because that has huge implications for my professional field.
So I just did a google search on
studies on the readability of justified vs ragged text
There were more results talking about the studies, than actual studies. I did find this:
Counter-Argument:
Both Styles have their place and purpose
Justified is better for formal texts with long lines and paragraphs
Ragged is better for informal texts or with short lines or narrow columns
https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-2/making-type-choices/justified-vs-rag-right
@Keybounce The study you cited said nothing about ease of reading. In fact, it stated quite clearly that there was no significant difference in comprehension between justified and ragged text.
What it did say, however, is that when reading longer passages, justified takes longer to read on average. That doesn't necessarily make it harder to read.
I did not ask for a Google search, which throws up a lot of dross. I asked for the specific studies YOU have read. And I ask that, as a professional in the field of education, and someone currently involved in postgraduate research in the field of education, because if there are many peer-reviewed studies with a significant sample size and that are deemed to have a small margin of error, and these overwhelmingly state that justified text has a negative impact on student comprehension and learning... That has massive impact for my profession and for education as a whole. It also has massive implications for other fields such as publishing.
It seems, however, that "the studies I have read" actually means random articles, reddit posts and Google results. Which are all fine as sources, but please forgive me if I don't change the learning policies of my school on the basis of your Google search.
Right... I am afraid you awoke the beast!
Several academic studies have been conducted on the subject of text alignment and how this impacts learners. However, sample sizes are often small with large margins of error. Additionally, as our understanding of reading behaviours grows and technology progresses, the way our word processors create justified rather than ragged texts also evolves, which provides different outcomes.
First of all, it is worth noting that many students and people with dyslexia find right ragged (left aligned) text preferable, if justification is created using a "greedy justification" system. According to the Dyslexia Center of Utah, an estimated 15 - 20% of the population experience language based learning disabilities which could impact their text preferences. However, this still falls far short of the "more than 50%" suggested by @Keybounce in his post.
A popularly cited study on justifcation and ease of reading is "Right is Wrong: An examination of the effect of right justification on reading" (Muncer, Gorman, Gorman and Bibel, published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, No1 Vol 17, 1986). This important piece of research was conducted at a time when personal computers were starting to become more prevalent, but word processing and the way justification was calculated were still in their infancy. But despite concluding that justified (or right aligned) text is more difficult to read than ragged text, it also concludes that readability depends on the type of justification - meaningful or "greedy". Furthermore, the sample size was only 57 students, and they were presented with oddity tasks of shorter skim-read sentences, rather than longer paragraphs that really tested the comfort and comprehension of justification. This is cited as a flaw in the research later in their article. Whilst the researchers consider that ragged lines act as markers, allowing the eye to move between lines more quickly, this doesn't impact ease or comprehension, and they concede that a continuous argument diminishes the effects of justified text, and actually benefits from the increased consumption time needed.
This early research that suggests ragged lines as markers is directly challenged by the research of Coll, Fjermestad and Coll in "An eight experiment sequence to determine reading equality" (Coll, Fjermestad and Coll, published in Information and Management 34, 1998). This piece talks in length about saccadic jumps and the details of reader eye movement. Several studies cited in this piece have tracked the eye movement of readers, which tend to fixate on content words rather than blank spaces. Therefore, the importance of ragged vs justified depends less on the blank spaces, but the importance of the information being conveyed and the reader's motivation for reading. The researchers of this article noted that the eye is trained to use a right margin as a cue for a return sweep, and that ragged edges are jarring for an immersed reader, suggesting that most readers rely on justified texts to read fluently and easily. In this study, Coll et al used 166 subjects, a much larger sample than the study 12 years previously. This time, there was no significant distinction in reading time, retention or comprehension between the ragged edge and various types of justification. If anything, there was a slight bias towards micro-fill justification, where blank space is inserted as fractional slivers of additional white space.
Lastly, out of interest, I had a read of a more recent piece of research, "A calligraphic based scheme to justify Arabic text, improving readability and comprehension" (Asmi and Alsaiari, published in Human Behaviour 39, 2014). My curiosity was piqued - if justified text is so difficult for more than 50% of the population, as @Keybounce claims, then why are these researchers pushing for these schemes in Arabic. In their abstract and introduction, they cite several studies that show (in line with the findings of the previous study) that justification results either has negligible impact or results in improved reading speed in English for variable-spacing right-justified text, in readers who have no existing language processing issues.
Should you find studies that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, available to read in their entirety (after all, abstracts can be misleading on occasion), and have details of sample size and methodology, I would be very interested to read them. I am always interested in reading, learning and changing my practice to suit the majority of students I work with. However, I am afraid, anecdotal evidence doesn't cut it for me. I may seem like a ditsy, fluffy little Hufflepuff here on the forum, but I am also a conscientious and thoughtful professional who wants real and justified arguments.
I do not maintain a list of studies that I read over the years, sorry.
The comments made do bring up some points. I do not know the sample sizes or error bars of what I've read or read about, and yes, sometimes I've only had summaries/abstracts instead of full.
And yes, I have mild dislexia. My eyes get "lost" when I don't have markers.
What I did find interesting, checking out more articles, is that the method of how the justification spacing is done matters significantly. And if I'm going off of older studies, that implies a lower-quality justification engine.
I understand what you are saying @Keybounce and I apologise if I came across a little too heavy handed. But my point is that, whilst it is normal to casually read articles and studies and forget where you saw them, if one is putting cross quite a passionate and vehement argument and trying to substantiate it with "studies I have read", then that evidence needs to be cited. Or rather, it doesn't need to be cited, but one can't expect for others to take it seriously without decent evidence.
I agree that the different methods of justifying text were interesting. I would hazard a guess that basic forum software such as this probably use less advanced forms of justification.
Oh, I am 100% certain that it is browser dependent. All the forum does is set a CSS flag, and the browser implements it however the browser does.