T minus 14 days to ATypI Brighton 2007: Captioning

If you watch captioned TV (not “subtitled” TV in any sense) for two hours a night five nights a week for a year, you’ll read over 4 million words. That’s a lot of words. We’ve been putting a lot of working into making the type on office-computer screens more readable (on Windows, mostly). But that isn’t all we’re reading offa screens.

Calculations

Jensema (1996) surveyed reading speeds of many television genres and display forms (scrollup vs. pop-on). Working solely from his reported averages, in words per minute (wpm) and per hour (wph):

• Scrollup: 151 wpm = 9,060 wph
• Pop-on: 138 wpm = 8,280 wph

Assume 25% of your viewing is scrollup, 75% pop-on. Two hours a night, then, equals:

0.25 × 2 × 9,060 + 0.75 × 2 × 8,280 = 16,950 words/night

Over 5 nights a week for 52 weeks, you’re reading 4,407,000 words a year.

If we assumed all scrollup captioning, the figure is 4,711,200. With all pop-on captioning, it’s 4,305,600. So the order of magnitude is the same.

Even if you do the same calculation with the very slowest captioning reported by Jensema (74 wpm), simply an impossible scenario even for young children abandoned in front of the TV by their moms, the order of magnitude is still comparable – 2.3 million. (With the maximum, 231 wpm, it’s 7.2 million.)

That’s a lot of words. While you’re lying on the couch. And relaxing. And not “working.” Now you can see why I think caption fonts are important.

My next speaking engagement – I still have those, as it turns out – is at the biggest and most prestigious annual typography conference, ATypI. This year it’s in Brighton (“The Acceptable Face of England), September 12–16. I was there in Vancouver in ’03, but the locations chosen for subsequent AsTypI, like Helsinki, cost more to fly to than Sydney. (A shame, really. Like Tyler Brûlé, I am at once an australophile and a nordiphile. Having been to Iceland, it’s one down, four to go.)

I think I’m the only person giving two papers at ATypI, which appears to be the result of strings being pulled behind the scenes, which I appreciate.

Wednesday, September 12, 11:30 (at Upcoming)

“Don’t show printouts to grannies and call that a test: Some scenarios for testing TV screenfonts”

Further debunking of the junk science behind Tiresias Screenfont, and some new, original directions for research and testing into caption and subtitle fonts.

Sunday, September 16, 11:30 (when everybody but me will be hung over; at Upcoming)

“Inscribed in the living tile: Type in the Toronto subway”

Whirlwind tour of everything that’s right and wrong with typography in the TTC. A cheat sheet so you can follow along in the audience: Right – original subway font. Wrong – pretty much everything else.

I’ll be liveblogging all the other sessions I attend, and I expect that, yet again, I’ll be the only one doing so. By default all sessions will be videotaped and posted online later, though the organizers have unwisely made it possible to opt out of that. It will be a rather interesting discussion about posting a video podcast of a lecture about captioning without captions, and another interesting discussion to decide what font to use for them if and when captions are provided.

I’ve also asked that audio-only be published. I would assume that, unlike with @media, the podcasts will not be selectively and peevishly edited after the fact, like airbrushing apparatchiks out of a Kremlin balcony photo.

I’ll publish my usual notes and additionally, in the TTC case, a 60-page, 16,000-word, 50-illustration, 70-citation research paper that reveals what really happened with Paul Arthur’s signage redesign, among other things. (I’m really pushing the limits of print CSS with that one.) Nobody from TTC will be there, and the entire organization will pretend that my lecture and research paper never took place. The gig will be up, but they’ll be in denial. Swiss 721 all around.

These presentations are a big deal, they come at an inopportune time, and I’ve been working like a dog all summer on them. Yes, that was my summer: Unpaid work on “academic” projects. And no goddamned business whatsoever.

En tout cas, to generate megaexcitement around these upcoming engagements, today I begin a series of postings on the theme of “14 Days to ATypI.” It’ll be two separate streams of a factoid per day, one for captioning and one for subway type. Due to the staggered presentation dates, they begin and end on different days. The captioning theme starts today (all posts: captioning theme; TTC theme).

You wouldn’t know it from the page that introduces the topic (love the pictures of text to indicate other languages – even a picture of Spanish!), but the TTC is running a survey on its own server, survey.ttc.ca. It’s an exercise in either propaganda or data collection, depending on your beliefs.

• The pages launches from a popup window. I’ve just solved that problem for you. Unrequested popups are a WCAG violation and are an accessibility barrier. We aren’t being persnickety about them; they get in people’s way. It also means that popup windows for error messages are forbidden too.

• How many tables for layout? 22. Validation errors? Only 18, mostly due to the unnecessary JavaScript.

• You must complete Question 6 (emphasis removed to reduce tackiness):

  The TTC is facing significant financial pressures. What do you feel is the best way for the TTC to deal with the funding gap? (Select all that apply)

  • Have the City of Toronto raise taxes to provide additional funding
  • Raise fares
  • Reduce service

  You cannot abstain from the question or give another answer.

• Best of all, typing in the first three characters of a valid postal code has them autoconvert before your very eyes to 4-2, which then gives you a pop-up error message. You can dismiss it, but you can’t fix the original problem.

  

You’ll also be able to fill out a paper form and drop it off in little boxes I’ve been seeing, and photographing, at subway stations since the weekend. That might be a better option, actually.

Remember: Even when they know they’re being watched, they carry right on fucking up.

Summarizing the results of a few design-related research papers. (Not an oxymoron; graphic design is not just about making things pretty.)

• A zero in a screenfont has to look like a zero, not an o. Microsoft-funded research came to the conclusion, embarrassing to Microsoft, that zeroes that look like lower-case os are harder to recognize than tall zeroes. In other words, if the task is distinguishing individual numbers, ranging or oldstyle figures just do not cut it onscreen.

  Three of the Microsoft Vista screenfonts (nobody can ever keep their names straight, so let’s not bother) scored between 6% and 16% recognition; other fonts with real zeroes, including three other Vista fonts and Verdana, never scored less than 60%. Centaur’s full-height zero scored 100%, but I wager its I-like 1 would flunk miserably.

  If you think oldstyle figures would be just dandy in printouts of Web sites, well, this seems rather like tits on a bull, but if you insisted, we could handle this in CSS by specifying a screen font and a print font, as God intended.

• Drawing on paper is indeed going out of style. Research (PDF) carried out over 20 years – before and after the arrival of desktop publishing – shows that fewer and fewer designers hand-draw many interations of a design or keep sketchbooks (20% fewer in the latter case). The history of a specific design job now tends not to exist, because we simply alter and re-save a computer file rather than erasing or writing over an existing drawing or making a new one.

  Almost nobody draws in front of a client, because they might be put off by the poor quality of the drawing, or think it looks too easy (“My eight-year-old could do that!”), or, paradoxically, might insist that the end product look exactly like that first little sketch. Still, in the post-DTP subjects studied, everyone insisted they started a project with hand-drawn sketches.

  There is no discussion of the fact that drawing on computer is overprecise. It isn’t really drawing; it’s drafting. But you had to be careful even with printed drawings: “If senior designers… produced overprescriptive drawings… they could limit the creative input [that] more junior team members felt able to make.” And, back dans la journée, everyone felt thay had to be able to sketch in different visual styles from memory. (Could you do that? I couldn’t.)

  To replace sketchbooks, now used one-fifth less often, I guess now we just bookmark (“favourite,” v.) the digital images we like. But I don’t see how people can keep those straight. I retain printouts of all important research papers (conservatively 12 linear feet of them) and still cannot find things. I lose pictures in my Flickr favourites. Other people’s Web pages can simply up and die (mine don’t). It’s unreliable.

  For the visual designer, I think you’d have to print things out and keep the sheets in the same place, a de facto scrapbook. Flickr tags are not going to work here, I don’t think. And to do this properly, as often as is genuinely needed, would require the use of colour laser printing.

• Planning is almost equivalent to research in a large design project. A somewhat vague paper (PDF) found that various steps of the design process are and can be used as “a planning tool.” You can turn this around and observe that activities like behavioural research (e.g., user testing), measurement and recording (like eyetracking), and, I’ll add, beta-testing are all the sorts of steps you carry out if you’re in a big company or you are just organized. But they’re also stages in the design process. It’s a two-for-one offer.

  Pretty much everything I’ve read on graphic-design research (including A Designer’s Research Manual by Jennifer Visocky) is liberal to the point of straining credulity in what it defines as “research.” Really, collecting a scrapbook about, say, contemporary images of African-Americans would constitute research in this context. I used to think this was somewhat dishonest, or was at least an attempt to gussy up graphic design in clothing that was a bit too small for comfort, but now I think that this degree of rigour is all that graphic design, as opposed to typography and science of reading, can realistically bear.

  Just as it is tedious and tendentious to read overblown criticism of a field that produces billboard and magazine layouts, it may be unrealistic to expect scientifically reproducible double-blind experiments backing up the efficacy of those layouts. The role of research papers like this one, and books like Visocky’s, is to tell graphic designers about themselves: If you’re halfway credible at what you do, then yes, a lot of your work really is research.

As of yesterday (2007.08.25), drivers on TTC surface routes are required to call out all stops. That’s all stops, not just the major ones, or the ones they can fit in while listening to an iPod in one ear and eating a slice of pizza with one hand (actual example on the 7 last week – I reported him).

It all happened after TTC lost an open-and-shut human-rights complaint filed by David Lepofsky, typically described as a “blind lawyer.” This was two years after Lepofsky won an indentical open-and-shut case against the TTC, this time about the subway. There, after both sides presented arguments, the head of the inquiry told everyone to stick around a minute, went to an office, fired up MS Word, and typed and printed out a complete vindication of Lepofsky on the spot.

If you find a bus or streetcar driver failing to call out stops, or talking on a cellphone at any time, or listening to an iPod, or eating outside of a meal break, or just being a total arsehole in some way or another, feel free to file a complaint by calling 416 393-3030 or by using their intentionally hidden online complaints form.

As Lepofsky has been saying all along, what he sought was announcement of stops, not the installation of an expensive automated system to do so. As of yesterday, Giambrone et al. cannot claim that they support the idea in principle but it’s taking just so danged long to get this new system up and running. Time has run out, and announcements must now be made.

I have just now whistled through (™ Simon Willison) the book Kissing Bill O’Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things to Love and Hate About TV by Ken Tucker. He’s an old-fart critic who’s been watching TV for decades, and he gives us 50 love/hate pairs, not always symmetrically matched.

Perhaps because it’s published by St. Martin’s, the book is strewn from start to finish with what a man of Tucker’s generation would call “typos” – everything from misspelled proper names to the following claimed chemical formula: C12, H22 0-11. I’m pushing three decades of word-processing use, and I can spot from a mile away a writer who’s typing as fast as the machine will let him. This, ostensibly, is why we have copy-editors. (They’ll also stop you from using “huggermugger” repeatedly – more occurrences in this book than anywhere else in the language.) And he hates music videos, possibly because all he ever watched was “Thriller.” But that’s a function of age; men of our generation are meant to leave them behind, like an ex-wife.

And for the love of God, knock this Adobe Garamond shit off already.

Nonetheless! [continue with: How to be wrong about ‘Wiseguy’ →]

I’ve been sitting on this one for ages.

While it is true that scarcely any homosexualists are involved in Web standards, or are even barely competent Web developers, or work as developers anywhere other than Yahoo, meaning I have absolutely no one to talk to at the various gatherings, perhaps it is all because HTML is too linear and structured for these pampered, artistique darlings, who all had such unhappy childhoods that they had to immerse themselves in Art and Fashion to compensate. (Such wonderful sweaters. And such sharply articulated sibilants, detectable with your back turned.)

Fine. It’s hopeless.

But then there’s the dykes! The other white meat!

I know the kids these days are, in my phrase, “all post-queer ’n’ shit,” but dykes who are old enough to hold a driver’s licence really do have a lot of things in common. Sure, go ahead, line up a bunch of exceptions to the rule, but I find them tough-as-nails, unsentimental, unafraid of machinery. They realize the computer does not know they are girls. Neither does the shaft-drive motorcycle.

True to form, staying organized is almost the most important thing in their lives. (Buddy Cole: A lesbian without a project is a menace to society.) They’re like Windows tinkerer-geeks, who secretly cherish the user-hostility of Windows because it gives them something to do on Saturday nights, only with postgraduate degrees and a mouldering resentment of Camille Paglia that they haven’t updated in years. (She’s a mom now, just like you!) I see dykes as an improbably efficient genre of Windows users, battling the operating system as if it were the patriarchy and the revolution were nigh. (I’m sitting here trying to combine the concepts of “Macintosh” and “lesbian,” but I’m not getting any pictures.)

So get these girls building Web sites already!

What are you waiting for, a singing telegram?

• They understand the importance of following rules – exactly the right rules, approved by consensus – and of doing and saying exactly the right thing. Just as you must wait for the facilitatrix to recognize you before you address the support-group meeting, so too must p wait its turn until h1 has closed.
• They want the Web to be inclusive of everyone – the poor, the disabled, even, if need be, non–womyn-born womyn, though that remains controversial within our diverse LGBTTQQI2S* communities.
• Project orientation means they relish the division of tasks in Web development. Think of the role-playing that personas can offer in usability testing. Why, I’ve never wanted to be a man before, but in this case, it really is fun!
• Since Web developers are straight guys most of the time, a dyke development team is a perfect occasion to stick it to the Man. More often than not, he deserves it.

You know how developing countries just skipped landline telephones altogether and went straight to cellular? Let’s just skip the fags altogether (demonstrably inept and too sensitive by half) and sign up a few dykes.

Sisterhood is powerful, and it validates.

Or Română. Three-dimensional Helvetica and an actual comma for a cedilla.

The grave accent is just a straight line, too.