[Pydotorg-redesign] Draft HTML for redesign proposal

[Roy Smith]

On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 02:26  AM, Michael Geary wrote:

>> http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/AHNCUR.html
>
> OUCH! That paper really is painful to look at. Green on yellow? What 
> were
> they thinking?

They were thinking about their own data.  They measured "Reaction Time" 
for various fonts and color combintations and found Green on Yellow to 
be the one that gave the fastest reaction times.

I wonder about their experimental population, though.  In the first 
paragraph of the paper, they point out that age and color-blindness are 
important factors, but they specifically excluded color-blind people 
from the cohort, as well as anybody with less than 20/20 corrected 
vision.  They make no mention of the age distribution of the subjects 
they used, but if it's done in a university setting, I wouldn't be 
surprised if it was mostly 20-somethings (grad students hungry to make 
$50 for an hour of their time).

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.

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.

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.