v-s.net v0.6

Saturday, 8:37 am in Geeking

Okay, so going on from what we were talking about yesterday (and what ~Jem [h] is talking about today) I present to you all: the Unjustify Bookmarklet.

So there you go, kids; the semantic web at it’s finest.  Just drag that into your toolbar and hit it on any site you come across with justified text (i.e. this one!).  Bam!  No more justification!  Too easy.

I was having some speaks with various people about yesterday’s post, and while I’ve still not got me no empirical evidence, it seems that the main ‘distracting’ things about justified text is the rivers of whitespace effect.  Okay, I got that, right.  I mean, at least in theory but… I never, ever see this!  Well, unless it is extremely pronounced (i.e. justified text in a 3-5 word column).

I find this revelation extremely interesting and now of course I’m wondering… why?  Seeing rivers rather than text is one of the major hallmarks of certain types of learning difficulties (i.e. dyslexia), but it seems that more than just that segment of the population notices them.  But I don’t; at least not in a way that is distracting,  So, either a large portion of designers are dyslexic (unlikely) or there is, in fact, something unusual about the way I see text.  Interesting.

What about you, curious readers?  Do you notice rivers?

• Tags » justified text, readability, standards, webdesign
• Comments By » ~nounbeast [h]