007 Still A Secret?
This months question comes from Bill Mitzel, risk control specialist for Unigard Insurance Services Group in Bellevue, Wash.
Q. As far as giving guidance on the character, or font, size on the screen, you noted, "follow the 007 rule" (see NU, Agency Technology on the Cutting Edge, March 10, 2003, page 29). Can you give us any more information on who adopted this rule, it's ergonomic/medical backing, etc? Size of text comes up quite often in completing ergonomic workstation assessments.
A: Tom Albin, professional ergonomist with Auburn Engineers Inc., headquartered in Auburn, Ala. (Website: www.ergopage.com), an ergonomics consulting firm had this to say:
Font size is a tough question, and depending on the screen resolution setting, fonts will appear to be of different sizes. To me, its just easier to actually measure it and calculate the ratio.
The standard was developed by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and is published in BSR/HFES-100 Draft Standard for Trial Use in the U.S. It is part of Human Factors Engineering of Computer Workstations standards through the societys Web site at www.HFES.org.
It is important to remember that the print and character size needs to be kept at a height that is legible. There is something called the 007 rule, as in James Bond. The idea behind that is whatever distance you are sitting away from the screen, such as 26 inches from the point on the screen you are viewing, the character should be .007 times that viewing distance. That will give you a character size that most people would be capable of reading.
How does the average person figure this out? I wish there were an easy way of doing it, such as "there is such and such font size at such and such distance," but it doesnt work that way. There is just too much confusion about what a font size really is. So the easiest thing to do is to put a ruler on your screen and measure how high a capital letter is, such at a capital "H," and that should be about seven-thousandths of your viewing distance. As long as the character size is good, you should be able to read the characters on the screen comfortably no matter what size the screen is. This should be true on even the smallest screens.
Got an agency tech question? E-mail Ara Trembly (atrembly@nuco.com or Mark Ruquet (mruquet@nuco.com).
Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, May 12, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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