Legibility of Type in Colour

 

This page is related to my text colour readability page, where by the use of sliders you can see the effect of coloured letters over different coloured backgrounds and asks the question, Why? What’s the point?

Why try measuring the readability of text in a given colour over a background of another colour? What’s the point? Someone who is designing something can see whether text is readable by the simple expedient of determining whether they can read it or not can’t they?

The answer to this question is yes, sort of, though there are at least three reasons why measuring colour readability might be worthwhile:

1. If you want to put, say, yellow text over a yellow background – which you might, if you want an overall yellow appearance – having a tool that works out which shade of yellow to put as text could be useful, saves a bit of trial and error. So if I set the colours on the experiments page to #FFFF00 for both text and background, and then I click ‘B’ness:=125’ (for the text is 10pt size)

The text colour will become just so it’s readable. Admittedly a bit more ochre-brown than yellow but then that’s a problem with yellows; yellow is a very light colour and as it gets darker we give it a different name.

So that could be useful.

2. A second reason for wanting to measure colour readability is that it’s one of those subjects where half the world is an expert, including quite often people who write academic books and papers and should know better – should know better than to make authoritative-sounding statements without experimenting first. So a method of experiment can be useful in determining whether an expert is right or not.

And of course many people whose information comes from myth and prejudice are experts too, so a means of backing-up one’s case can be useful here, though with those who live by myth and prejudice, a case is notoriously not necessarily a great deal of use, but perhaps better than no case at all.

3. I’m well aware that in the real world the background that a piece of text is laid over may not be of a uniform colour, and that this makes matters a bit more complicated. More interesting too, perhaps, and I’ll have more to say on this when I get round to it. I’m also keenly aware that just because a particular colour is readable over a particular other colour, it doesn’t mean that the result necessarily looks pleasing – it could look horrible. This issue, the science of aesthetics, is the third reason why there may be point in these text colour readability experiments and about which I’ll say more sometime.