The impact of the text and background color on the screen reading experience

Abstract

Everyday use of modern technologies implies the need for an optimization of readability and legibility parameters used for the reading of text on screen. A lot of research on readability and legibility in printed materials and digital media has been conducted. It has been noted that the rules for the optimal readability and legibility do not apply equally to both mediums. The choice of proper typeface and font size, foreground and background colour, line spacing, sentence length, and text difficulty have the biggest role in text legibility. There is a tendency in our speaking area to read black text on a white background, which is a standard colour combination in printed materials. Furthermore, many studies have concluded that the above mentioned colour combination is one of the best when it comes to achieving optimal text readability and legibility. The purpose of this study was to test the readability and legibility of text on a computer screen by taking into consideration the different colour combinations of text and background. The factors listed above were used to define the text sample. In this research, for each of the five groups tested, the colour of the text and background were varied, while the content and other parameters of the text sample were constant.

Keywords

• colour
• eye tracking
• legibility
• readability
• reading speed
• text