Design Guidelines for Web Readability

Reading is fundamental to interactive-system use, but around 800 million of people might struggle with it due to literacy difficulties. Few websites are designed for high readability, as readability remains an underinvestigated facet of User Experience. Existing readability guidelines have multiple issues: they are too many or too generic, poorly worded, and often lack cognitive grounding. This paper developed a set of 61 readability guidelines in a series of workshops with design and dyslexia experts. A user study with dyslexic and average readers further narrowed the 61-guideline set down to a core set of 12 guidelines -- an acceptably small set to keep in mind while designing. The core-set guidelines address reformatting -- such as using larger fonts and narrower content columns, or avoiding underlining and italics -- and may well aply to the interactive system other than websites.

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