What Font Color Is Best For Eyes? 702
juraj writes "What font color and what background is best for the eyes, when you work for a long time? I have found various contradictory recommendations and I wonder if you know about any medical studies on this topic."
wtf (Score:1, Informative)
Green or Yellow on Black (Score:2, Informative)
Green is right in the middle of our visible spectrum which makes it the easiest for our eyes to pick up.
As for which is healthiest for the eyes, probably listening to an audio-book version of the same text...
Correct, also calibration and slashdot circa '01 (Score:3, Informative)
Shaunn (Score:2, Informative)
I found the following link discussing the topic: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000M0&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E.T [edwardtufte.com].
The article discussed the best is a dark background with a bright font, but the conversation seemed to be too "environmental" as it it depends on the viewers local light setting instead of being generally independent of any local lighting.
What if I am "forced" to operate using a light/bright background and darker contrasting font?
In my opinion, experience, and local preference I have found dark grey font as easy on my eyes. It is my opinion but I do a lot of reading online with many fonts.
medium contrast; medium saturation (Score:5, Informative)
My terminals all use a light white on dark grey scheme, and my preferred vim color scheme has been ps_color [vim.org] for quite a while. (here's a useful site for visually comparing a ton of color schemes (in iframes) all at once: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/ [cmu.edu]. )
Re:Not color (Score:3, Informative)
Seconded. Monitor at 50-60% bright, color temp at D50. Give your eyes a while to adjust (as in, give the cramps a while to subside), maybe a day or two.
I've still got my decent CRT from ... 1998? 1998. Black-on-white for documents, green-on-black 10pt Courier for terminals, syntax coloring is ok mostly. I miss the layout tweaking I could do on Apple's Terminal; line- and letterspacing with sliders let me get my setup Just Exactly Right. It matters.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Informative)
Our eyes can differentiate shades and hues of green better than any other colours -- this is an inherited survival trait from when it was important to see predators and distinguish ripe from almost-ripe. Blue, on the other hand, wasn't as important to survival, so we can't tell too many shades of blue apart, nor very far towards ultraviolet. We perceive indigo (the traditional indigo, not the "purple" that's called indigo these days) as a dark colour, for example, because it's at the edge of what we can see.
Re:Yellow on Blue (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A little more info please. (Score:5, Informative)
If you are in a dark room, anything with a white background is waaay too bright, and light color on dark is preferrable. In a bright environment, on the other hand, the you see more reflections against a dark background, so you want to make your background bright, and the font color dark.
Re:Leopard OSX fonts a polychromatic and easy to r (Score:4, Informative)
Human perception, cognition, and computers: HCI (Score:5, Informative)
Text - background polarity affects performance irrespective of ambient illumination and colour contrast. [nih.gov]
and
A study of reading time and viewers' preferences for a variety of combinations of character-background chromaticity for small traditional Chinese characters. [nih.gov]
but don't let me do all your clicking for you:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=legibility+of+color+combinations+on+screen&spell=1 [google.com]
Re:Leopard OSX fonts a polychromatic and easy to r (Score:5, Informative)
Steve Gibson has an interesting article on it here:
http://www.grc.com/ct/ctwhat.htm [grc.com]
Re:Refresh Rate (Score:3, Informative)
Beside that, it's a little silly to talk about "below X Hz" as though the amount of flicker was related only the to the vertical refresh rate and not say, the display type. Even if you limit your discussion to monitor-quality CRTs you still have to consider the persistence of the phosphor. I know it's not a spec that's easy to find, but it's an important part of monitor performance if you're sensitive to flicker.
Multi-sync monitors typically have low-persistence phosphors that allow you to run ridiculously high refresh rates. But that property actually increases the amount of flicker at lower refresh rates, essentially requiring you to run the display faster. Fixed-sync displays (or those with a more limited sync range) have very little refresh-related flicker, because the phosphor persistence in designed to match the vertical refresh rate.
For an easy to produce example, compare a static image on a multi-sync monitor running at 60 Hz vertical refresh to a similar image on a CRT TV -- the TV has much long persistence and much less flicker at low vertical refresh rates.
It's quite possible to design a tube with a low vertical refresh rate without introducing significant amounts of flicker. It's just not possible to run that tube at 180 Hz, and it's easy for people to believe higher number == better product there's been some push to increase the refresh rate in monitors, regardless of what it actually does for performance in the 80 Hz - 100 Hz range that most people will actually use.
Re:Blue on Black (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not sure if there's something like that in Windows.
It's also good for reading at night and you don't want the entire room to see you're face lit up like a Christmas tree.
Theory!? (Score:2, Informative)
There might be theory as to how the signals are processed in the optic nerves, but we definitely do not have cones for 'channels'
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Informative)
We use red because red is way out the end of the visible spectrum and red light excites the L cones but not the M cones. If we were to use yellow-green we'd be exciting the M cones too much. The average person has about twice as many M cones than L or S cones, (we're very sensitive to green light) so yellow-green ends up exciting the M cones more than the L cones. By adjusting the amount of red (L cone excitation), green (M cone excitation) and blue (S cone excitation) we can replicate in the eye the cone response any visible colour would generate.
The human vision system is not like a camera - the cone response is only one part of a long and complex chain. Afterimages are somewhat a function of photo-pigment bleaching and later stages of visual processing in the nervous system and brain.
Cone response references:
Stockman, A. & Sharpe, L., "The spectral sensitivities of the middle- and long-wavelength-sensitive cone derived from measurements in observers of known genotype'', Vision Research, Volume 40, Issue 13, Pages 1711-1737, 16 June 2000
http://cvision.ucsd.edu/cones.htm [ucsd.edu]
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:3, Informative)
As far as monitors go, it's often easier on the eyes if you lower the color temperature to 6500K. It will look yellow at first but your eyes will adjust.
-Aaron
Re:a serious response... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Informative)
Our eyes don't work like that -- they don't scan the visible spectrum from low to high, and see blue as the opposite end of red. Instead, we have receptors for certain colours, and base our colour perception on how much each of those get triggered. This is why colour blindness hits red/green or yellow/blue, despite those colours not being adjacent on the spectrum.
Yes, we have different color sensors, but this is beside the GP's point. The green response curve overlaps significantly with red and blue. See the spectral response here [ed.ac.uk]. Red/Blue flashing lights will cause a significant color contrast as they alternately hit one type of cone and then the other. Even though the response to blue is low, it is still an effective color to use because the human eye's response is logarithmic wrt to brightness (i.e. take the graph I linked above and take the log the y dimension). Even that's a simplification when you add rods to the mix, but that's a subject for another post or later research.
Our eyes can differentiate shades and hues of green better than any other colours -- this is an inherited survival trait from when it was important to see predators and distinguish ripe from almost-ripe. Blue, on the other hand, wasn't as important to survival, so we can't tell too many shades of blue apart, nor very far towards ultraviolet.
This is wrong. We can identify more hues of blue than any other color, followed by red, while the intermediate hue discrimination can be quite low. Green sucks because that cone's frequency response is highly correlated with parts of the other two, and thus it forms somewhat of a degenerate basis for describing a hue with the 3 weights. Google "Hue-discrimination curve" for more info.
The evolutionary argument for this has *no* good evidence supporting it, but has become a very vibrant meme (I won't call it a legend, since it is an unproven theory). Green is bright for a variety of potential reasons: (1) It's one of the easier pigments for synthesize biologically, (2) There's a lot of green light coming from the sun, (3) It's a good baseline from which to differentiate other colors (there's a lot of green in our environment), and (4) yeah maybe it could have to do with rotten/ripe fruit. I'd bank on the first two though, especially noting that our hue sensitivity in the green range sucks. Predators are best to detect via motion (primarily rods), and by non-green cones (predators are camouflaged best against rods, i.e. non color vision, i.e. luminance, which overlaps most with green). You can of course believe whatever theory you want, but please don't start speaking about one as being authoritatively true; I know some evolutionary biologists like to extrapolate really far from the evidence, but it always hurts when they are wrong on some theory that gets discounted, since it gives creationists a hammer to bludgeon all of biology and science with. Please don't give them that ammo, and label speculation as speculation until there's real concrete evidence to show. For evolution of these traits, that means sticking mostly to the "what" and "how", and not claiming "why" except in the most general and statistically supportable terms.
We perceive indigo (the traditional indigo, not the "purple" that's called indigo these days) as a dark colour, for example, because it's at the edge of what we can see.
It's not just that its near the edge, it's more complicated with several factors: (1) The blue cones are not that sensitive, (2) there is no additive luminance response due to the other cones frequency response falling off completely at violet, and (3) the rods don't even respond to it very well (last point only really matters for
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:4, Informative)
red on black is NOT easy on the eyes, as anyone who's owned a virtual boy can tell you.
Personally I found that (Score:5, Informative)
It generally boils down to: IMHO most people I've seen using computers are doing it wrong for their eyes.
For starters make sure you use a large enough, and clear enough, font so you don't have to squint. If you absolutely need 80 lines on the screen when editing sources, that's usually your clue that there's something wrong with your programming style (and I suspect for some people the short term memory too.) You shouldn't have methods that run over that many lines, unless they're truly trivial stuff. (Like, say, a long switch statement where each line does no more than delegate to a method of its own. Arguably there are better ways there too, but I don't find it to be the end of the world either.)
IDE's also offer a lot of tools to find the method you need, when you need it, and/or collaps/expand blocks so the don't take up screen estate when you don't need them. There's also stuff like showing you the parameters anyway, so you don't have to have a second window in which you look for the parameters to that method. And really lots of other stuff. Use those instead of cramming the absolute maximum lines of text on the screen.
When I see a couple of co-workers squinting at their 6 point Illegible Roman font in VI and doing greps manually in another illegible tiled window, heh, I'm just itching to tell them to move out of the stone age already. We even discovered this funky thing called the "wheel" in the meantime, ya know?
Clean your monitor regularly, especially if it's a CRT. CRT's have thick glass, and your eyes end up focusing back and forth between the dirt on the front side of it, and the letters on the back side of it. But it's distracting and tiresome on TFTs too. And if you need to squint because you're at the point of "is that a 'm' or a 'rn'? Or is it 'rh' behind that speck?" it's long overdue for a cleaning.
Do turn your contrast up, but turn your brightness down to a comfortable level. The monitor is not supposed to be an AA searchlight. Staring into very bright stuff, especially in a dark room, _is_ tiresome. Here especially the TFT's are the biggest offenders. The manufacturers got stuck on bragging about the brightness of their monitors, as if that's something good, and pre-set them to insanely bright levels. Turn that down to where you can live with the white for hours.
And it will be even more important when you have to focus on stuff that's the other way around: white on black. (Some websites love that scheme, for example.) On an ultra-bright monitors that will mean focusing on a mostly black screen, so your pupils are wide open, but some pieces of retina are getting to see some really bright letters. It's a recipe for a headache.
As a side-note, I'm genuinely surprised at how many people do the exact opposite. I've seen too many monitors which are turned to abysmal contrast, and as bright as halogen headlights. I mean, WTF? Some things are barely legible in that configuration.
Ok, so maybe it's good for PC games, where the average dev seems to think that every fucking thing must happen in nearly complete darkness. 'Cause, you know, we have 32 bit colours so we can display all the gamut of "black", "really dark", "dark grey", "room with a broken lightbulb" and "grey stone on a moonless night". But the brightness settings where you see in near dark in games, suck for work or even reading in a browser. If you use the same monitor for games, consider turning up the brightness or gamma up in those, instead of turning the monitor's brightness all the way to the right.
If you're stuck with a CRT, make sure it's a good one and properly tuned. Staring into an unfocused image, especially with small unfocused fonts, is a recipe for a headache.
Again, for CRT users, just because everything idiotically defaults to 60 Hz, is no
Re:Leopard OSX fonts a polychromatic and easy to r (Score:5, Informative)
They use a couple of electromagnetic coils in the rear of the tube to guide an electron beam to the right point on the CRT's surface, but it is not so precise on most models (though maybe some really high end stuff for scientific work) as to be able to exactly hit specific phosphorescent spots.
This is why sub-pixel rendering works on LCDs but not CRTs (which turn on and off [or shade] specific color points digitally), because we know the exact shape and color layout of each pixel.
Re:Leopard OSX fonts a polychromatic and easy to r (Score:3, Informative)
On Windows font antialiasing makes fonts thinner but not on a Mac. On a Mac their goal is precision of the characters for print so the sizes and thinkness are correct although they look a little fuzzy on screen.
Re:Leopard OSX fonts a polychromatic and easy to r (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/PenetrantTest/Introduction/lightresponse.htm [ndt-ed.org]
In terms of raw sensitivity, green produces the most signal at the lowest intensity. I've personally found that is true, and green on black is my usual choice; I've tried them all, yellow is next best, which also fits the curve.
As PP points out, though, the visual system is complex, and the receptor distribution will vary for each person. It's also been found (no reference, sorry) that most people read words as a chunk, not by resolving and assembling the individual letters, so choice of font and kerning probably has more to do with readability than the color of the text.