I practiced optometry in Lakeland for forty-three years before I retired, and in all that time the complaint I heard most was some version of "Doc, I think I need stronger glasses." Half the time they didn't. They'd been trying to read the television listings printed gray on gray, or the side of a cereal box, or a church bulletin run off on a tired mimeograph machine. Their eyes were fine. The printing wasn't.

My grandson put a computer in my den two years ago, and I have spent a good part of my retirement since then reading home pages. Some are wonderful. And a great many have the cereal box's trouble: the words sit right on top of a patterned background, in a color that fights it, and reading them is like reading a newspaper through a screen door. People blame their eyes. It isn't their eyes.

So I tested it the way I'd have tested anything in the office: the same conditions for every test, the same readers, everything written down. I took every background on GeoCities.us that anyone may use on their own page, 22 of them, and tried black, white and yellow words on each. Every one is shown on the results page with its scores.

How we tested

What we found

Twenty-two backgrounds and three colors of words make 66 combinations. Here's how they scored:

Only one combination earned a 5: black words on the parchment tile, which is pale and soft and nearly plain. (Dorothy Prettyman, who drew it, says on her own page that it's the only one of her tiles you could put words straight onto. Our four readers agree with her.) Nearly half the combinations scored a 1. And on half of the backgrounds, 11 of the 22, there was no color of words at all that any of us could read easily.

Why: a short lesson in reading

Contrast is what you read. Your eye finds a letter by its edges, where dark meets light. What matters most is not the colors themselves but the difference in brightness between the letters and whatever is right behind them. Black on white has the most there is. Yellow on white has almost none, which is why it disappears.

A busy pattern behind words tires the eye. A pattern has edges too, hundreds of them: every scale, every bubble, every stitch of a gingham check. Those edges compete with the edges of the letters, and your eye and brain have to sort out which edges are words and which are wallpaper, letter by letter. You read more slowly, your eyes go back over lines more often, and after a few paragraphs you're tired and don't know why. Worse, on a pattern with both light and dark parts, no single color of words can contrast with all of it. Black words vanish on the dark patches and white words vanish on the light ones.

About one man in twelve has some red-green color deficiency. For women it's closer to one in two hundred. Most of these men aren't "color blind" in the sense of seeing gray. They see colors, but reds and greens of about the same brightness can look nearly alike to them. Red words on a green background, or green on red, can simply vanish. In our test Allan scored the red gingham and the green grass about the same as the rest of us, because we used black, white and yellow words, which differ from those backgrounds in brightness. Put red words on the grass tile and he would have been lost. Anyone making a Christmas page with red letters on green should know this.

Older eyes need more contrast and bigger type. After about forty, the lens of the eye stiffens and can't focus up close as well; that's why we all end up with reading glasses. Later on, the pupil gets smaller and the lens yellows and scatters more light. By sixty, roughly a third as much light reaches the back of the eye as at twenty. Low contrast that a teenager doesn't notice can be unreadable to her grandfather. Our readers were all past sixty, on purpose. If a page works for us, it works for nearly everyone.

Red words on blue seem to shimmer. Try it:

The lens of the eye bends blue light more strongly than red, so red and blue come into focus at slightly different depths. Your eye can't hold both sharp at once, and it hunts back and forth between them, so the words seem to vibrate or hover in front of the background. It's harmless, but after a paragraph it's exhausting. Red on blue, blue on red: avoid both.

The retired sign painter Tom Ulmer keeps a fine chart of the 216 Safe Colors, and on his notes page he lists the color pairs that read best from across a road, black on yellow at the top, along with a few he wouldn't letter on anything: red on green, which he says a lot of color-blind men can't read at all, and blue on red, which he says buzzes like a bad neon tube. He learned that from forty years of signs. I learned it from forty-three years of eyes. We came out in the same place.

A word about bifocals. If you wear bifocals, the reading part of your lens is made for about sixteen inches, and your screen is farther away than that, so you end up tipping your head back to see it, and your neck aches by the end of the evening. Tell your eye doctor how far away your screen sits. There are glasses made for that distance.

This is general information about reading and the eye, not advice about your own eyes. If you're having trouble reading, at the screen or anywhere else, see your eye doctor. It may not be the page.

On to the results: all 22 backgrounds

Patients since August 1999:

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Last updated Thursday, September 23, 1999