Reading on a screen is a lousy experience
Reading a computer screen sucks. More often than not, the designer behind the interface we’re using (web pages, news readers, browsers, applications) didn’t think about content readability or accessibility during the design process – which makes many of us give up. There’s so much great content being written (in the blogosphere and elsewhere) that its a shame so little is being done to fix this.
There are few solutions for the problem of combining short attention span (that the web is causing in all of us) versus online content readability. I believe it is up to us designers and developers, those of us who care about user experience, to tackle the problem in new ways. It will take rethinking layouts, font sizes, color schemes and contrasts. It will take serious advances in web standards (CSS 3 will help). But more importantly, it’ll take a mentality change – in all of us. We need to realize that people want to (but can’t) read.
If the web is to become the de facto medium for the publishing of knowledge, we need to get much better at using it. And by that I mean we definitely need to get better at displaying text on a screen – or else, we’ll just keep giving up.
A great example of what you’re saying and a test I do lot’s of times to test web usability is to read/navigate on a website using Opera Mini on my cellphone. It’s so easy to make it work smoothly, and yet so few do it… People should understand that we’re walking towards a web where people use several devices, technologies and means to access web info, and if your info isn’t accessible, it’s your loss.
I think it also has to do with the fact that there is so much crap (low-quality stuff/spam) on the internet that we’ve got to instinctively try and summarize and make decisions on whether it’s interesting or not. Hence low-attention spans. Like watching TV.
Humans eventually corrupt/change the quality of every system.