[Pydotorg-redesign] Draft HTML for redesign proposal

[Tim Parkin]

>Color blindness affects a significant portion of the population.  
>According to http://www.hhmi.org/senses/b130.html, 7% of American males

>are red/green deficient.

Unfortunately when you have no other research, you try to re-evaluate
the statistical evidence given in the research you do have. In this
case, there was obviously a reason why they concluded that lower
contrasts gave better readability results, what we have to do is say.
Well there was either very little difference or there was a slight
readability improvement for lower contrasts. 

>Their experimental technique was to present short (150 or so word) 
>passages and ask the subject to find a given "shape" word (i.e. 
>"square", "circle", "triangle", etc).  I'm not convinced that scanning 
>for a specific word is anything like reading for comprehension.  On the

>other hand, for something like a reference manual, scanning for a given

>word may indeed be what you want to optimize.
I won't go into detail about how people read as there is an amazing
amount of research out there but it's got a lot more to do with scanning
word shapes than recognising letters. 

>There is also another thing to consider.  Even assuming that some case 
>could be made that Green on Yellow increases reading comprehension, it 
>is (IMHO) ugly.  One of the goals of the web site is to be visually 
>pleasing, and Green on Yellow doesn't meet that goal.
Green and yellow is horrible as we know which is why I've not used it.
However having done a little more research about scotopic sensitivity or
Meares Irlen Syndrome, I've found that this supposedly affects a
significant proportion of the population (between 4% and 12% depending
on where you look) This isn't a subset of dyslexia and can appear on
it's own (although between 4% and 10% for dyslexia). There is a also a
strong link between Aspergers/Autism and with autism and aspergers
rising rapidly and aspergers itself being a very common condition among
programmers (geeks) I think maybe it's worth considering as long as it
doesn't affect any other large group of people. I've yet to have anyone
say they have difficulty reading the 80% contrast text. Maybe a large
survey would be good? I'll look into it some more and maybe do some user
testing when possible.

Tim

Tim


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