PSY%SEUMDC51.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Ake Olofsson) (03/25/88)
Years ago, in the dark northern Swedish winter, I wrote a message to one of the directors of the Swedish telephone company, using a local computer conferencing system. It was not a very pleasant letter, but urgent. After a month he replyed and said that the delay was caused by malfunctions in his printer. He had not been able to read my letter for several weeks until the printer was fixed. I did not understand why he could not read from a monitor and concluded that he was hiding something. However, later I found out that he simply did not like CRT-reading, advocating that it negatively affected his reading comprehension. Today I know that his represents a very common opinion among ordinary users - a lot of people don't like CRT-reading. Recent discussion in Computers and Society has pointed out a few cases where reading from a CRT seems to be favored. Some people like it and some reading tasks are better done on screen. To a large extent this discussion has focused on personal preferences. These are real and important, and I find it very interesting to read the opinions of a wide range of computer-users. But there is also a less subjective side of this question. There seem to be mainly two reasons for difficulties with CRT-reading. The first has to do with the early or peripheral visual stages of the reading process. A lot of research has found that, even for highly experienced subjects, proof-reading (quite a familiar task to most academics) is slightly slower on standard CRT displays than on paper. The disadvantage with a CRT can be reduced using high resolution displays and black characters containing grey level (anti-aliased) on white background and a font resembling real printing. (See Gould et al., Human Factors, Vol 29, No 5). Research in Umea has shown that syntactic errors in a text can be spotted more effectively using a CRT. (Jarvella & Lundberg, in preparation). The second factor has to do with our ability to maintain orientation in text, which is harder with only 24 lines visible and no spatial, tactile information about the rest of the text. In reading documents and books, we have a feeling of where in the text we are. You can get an idea manually how far from the end of the document you are, and leave a finger at an important passage while looking ahead. This visual tactile method may not be exact (as indicated by Robert Kennedy in Computers and Society Vol3No10) but the important thing is that it is cheap, demands little cognitive effort, is nonverbal and is fast. Reading on a computer, on the other hand, usually requires using commands which may interfere with the actual reading process more than the direct physical manipulation of hardcopy does. Partly,this problem can be compensated for with larger screens, scroll bars and a mouse, but text-handling on computers still may put special demands on the user's spatial ability (See Vicente et al., Human Factors, Vol 29, No 3). The orientation-in-text problem may explain why we feel uncomfortable in reading tasks demanding a full grasp of a text's structure. Reading tasks can be very different. Reading, comprehending and locating information in text are not the same thing (Guthrie & Kirsch, Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 79, p 220). A great deal of the reading done in job settings consists in locating information. When locating information, the task is more to remember *where* you read than *what* you read, and to compare where you are with respect to your goal and decisions needed for the next step. I think that a better understanding of these differences between reading from computer display and hardcopy can help the reader to monitor and direct his own reading and in a relaxed way to find a personally satisfying solution combining medium and reading task. Ake Olofsson