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Comment by dlandis | Hacker News Reader

As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read, I can't stand sites like Medium that display that annoying toolbar with the Twitter icon every time you highlight something. Terrible UX in my opinion.

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I've observed that behavior in others but never done it myself. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight as I read, I nevertheless agree that a toolbar that appears on highlight is obnoxious for a reading-oriented site. (Meanwhile, I can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.)

I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting. I assume it's just a "tick" as they say. But I wonder if it has anything—even in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight text, I often intentionally highlight text to quickly and nearly-effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers. If I did this more often, I could see it developing into a habit.

My focus wanders quite a bit when doing anything in general, so I highlight text when reading webpages to help anchor my attention and forcefully keep track of where I am.

Otherwise, my eyes tend to jump around the page in a horribly ineffective attempt to speed-read and I miss a lot of details.

The reading behavior you describe is common among people who use my startup’s software, which assists visual tracking when reading. Sorry if this is taking things too far off-topic, but hopefully this is helpful for some of the people who highlight while reading on-screen.

http://www.beelinereader.com/individual

I wanted to try this, but apparently your Firefox extension is not version 58 compatible at the moment.

It is not—this is something we are working on still. Sad for us too—Firefox is my daily driver! Hope to have this out in the next couple months, but it's not a simple port, unfortunately.

Where are the peer-reviewed studies for this?

I'm interested to see the statistics on people who found it easier to do with your app than without.

My personal result was 3% extra speed, which is decent but not too impressive. Was wondering what the average & median were.

There are several independent (but not peer-reviewed) studies, mostly done with students. In that context, reading fluency gains can be up to 100% in the course of a month. But for adult readers the max would be around 30%, with the average around 20% and the median a bit below that.

For some people, speed is the only thing they care about, and I'd agree that 3% isn't a huge bump. But for others, the primary benefit is ease of reading, especially for long periods of time. This ease benefit is subjective and therefore hard to measure (vision scientists tend to look at blink rate, but this is an imperfect proxy), but in our experience about 85% of readers find it easier with the colors. Interestingly, this varies by device size, with a more pronounced effect on smaller screens.

Your site cuts off on the right hand side on Chrome Android. There is also no margin on the sides which doesn't give me a lot faith in an app that is supposed to assist with visual guidance of reading.

Thanks for the feedback—the website was relaunched recently and although I was assured it worked on all major platforms I was only able to test with my own device. Would love to know what size your screen is, since this is likely linked to that.

I personally do it just before scrolling. I'll highlight a few lines of text 2/3 down the page, then scroll until it's right at the top of the page. It's an easy way to avoid losing my place.

I've also seen people who use the highlighted block to follow their gaze, though I can't speak to the logic behind that.

I often use highlighting as a positional anchor, often when tired. My eyes begin to lose focus and I can end up reading the same line over-and-over again.

In some cases contrast highlighting doesn't work, particularly on macOS since it doesn't seem to change the text color on highlight. It's notoriously bad in my experience when trying to read a downvoted comment on HN. You end up with a super light text on a very pale blue, that is even harder to read.

I got into the habit in the 90's when using it to scroll the page faster. Since I was already clicking on links, my hand was on the mouse. It was a lot easier to click and drag content than to click the toolbar on the right or to move my hand to the arrow keys.

> But I wonder if it has anything—even in small part—to do with the bad contrast on a lot of sites and the fact that browsers render highlighted text with good contrast. Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue. As someone who doesn't randomly highlight text, I often intentionally highlight text to quickly and nearly-effortlessly correct bad color selections by the site's designers.

Mostly to ensure I keep my APM high on HackerNews.

What does your employer use as a baseline APM quota for productivity?

I remember if you were lower than 100 in WC3 you were a noob.

In contrast to the other replies you've gotten, I think my habit of highlighting is more of a nervous tic than a conscious decision to help me read. The habit is certainly related to my tendency to play computer games that require a lot of clicking (League of Legends/Starcraft), but if memory serves correctly I've been doing it since before I started playing any games. Also, I'm the kind of person that will sit at my desk with a pen clicking and un-clicking it endlessly before I remember that other people are annoyed by that kind of behavior.

This makes sense. Years ago when I worked in fast food, I noticed that about 30 minutes into my shift, I'd constantly tap the side of the screen when taking orders because the rate of tapping necessary to keep up with people talking would keep my hand moving quickly, then during the pauses, I'd find it difficult to hold still.

It's actually not uncommon and you can probably see someone do it next time you walk into a fast food joint.

I multitask a lot (or better, gets distracted super easily) so I mark lines to have a reference to return to. And as you say most sites have a bad highlighting color combination, so I am used now to highlight a paragraph just above where I'm at

I do it to keep focus on a line of text, but since I also don't like the highlight, turn it off, and do it on repeat

But also its kinda fun

I think I started it in DOS as a way to scroll text. Highlighting/selecting text and moving the mouse to the very bottom started scrolling

I randomly highlight. It definitely didn't start as a way to scroll text; I have never been aware of the behavior you describe. It's just something you can do.

I like to find places where the beginning and end of the highlight align vertically.

I find it funny I just randomly highlighted your comment, as I was reading about you wondering why people randomly highlight.

I use it to keep track of where I am on sites like HN that have some combination of wide content, small fonts, and tight line spacing. It gives my eye something to flick back to when I'm scanning back to the start of a line.

> Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue.

Agree with OP and super OP. This is exactly why I do it (highlight). Question: Is there any consensus on which combination of text color/background color is best for reading?

The contrast ratio is far more significant than the exact colors. I’d recomend using a WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) conforming contrast checking when picking colors. A 4.5:1 ratio is recomended for normal size text. Here’s a simple web based one: http://colorsafe.co/.

While this will sound snarky in a way I don't mean it to, there are people who will reflexively scream the contrast is terrible how can any of you read any of this if your colors aren't #FFF on #000 or vice-versa. I've lost count of how many times I've come across folks insisting that, say, #444 text on an #EEE background is utterly unreadable. (In fact, it's an 8.4:1 contrast ratio, and easily passes the WCAG's more stringent AAA guidelines for normal text.)

I read once upon a time - and can't find it now - that white or yellow text on a dark blue background was the best combination, and that's why a lot of Microsoft curses-type software uses that scheme (e.g., edit.exe).

https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/e/doseditwindow.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/D9wzGjkYvqs/maxresdefault.jpg

> (Meanwhile, I can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.)

I wonder if part of that observed difference is also in how the respective toolbars are engineered?

- The medium highlight toolbar is 100% opaque and directly next to the highlight, obscuring previous words in the paragraph.

- The Word highlight toolbar has mechanics whereby it doesn't always open directly above the highlighted region, very quickly becomes transparent if you don't interact with it, and dismisses itself entirely just as quickly if you move the mouse too far away or scroll the page.

That "Mario ghost shyness" built into the Word highlight toolbar I think makes a big difference in the feel of those popups.

The Word hover toolbar was one of the innovations in office 2007 (along with the Ribbon, live preview, and contextual grammar) and it’s one of my favorite features for the reasons you specify. A truly awesome feature that does not get nearly enough attention and is missing in places like google docs.

Often, I find that I have no need to actually use the ribbon, because what I need pops up near my cursor when I select the text I want to edit.

Highlighting the line you read last makes it easier to recover your place in the text after scrolling down.

I’ve been doing it since ~2006. Contrast was not an issue back then, and my very young eyes wouldn’t have (and still don’t) cared.

I think maybe it was a manifestation of ADHD. Highlighting what I read helped me keep track of where I was if I got distracted (e.g. by a thought, which happens a lot). It also helps me if I get distracted or fail to parse a sentence - I can easily go back to the last known good state and restart reading.

Websites doing weird things on highlight (or preventing highlighting) piss me off to no end.

Another tick possibly due to ADD: I consistently close my browser tabs. I’ve met a lot of people who need special extensions so they can have 100+ tabs open, and that drives me absolutely nuts. If I’m done using it, I close it and if I need to come back later I google(DuckDuckGo really) it.

Never diagnosed with ADD (although this diagnosis really doesn't exist much in Germany), but I do the same for the same reasons. Even the browser tabs.

I do the same exact thing. It drives me crazy that I can't highlight on an article without causing either a post to twitter box or the font size changing (I'm looking at you NYT). On a random note, do you know what that special extension that allows a user to have 100+ tabs open. I have a family member that always keeps way to many tabs open (drives me nuts as well!).

I follow similar patterns to you. One big thing for me is also looking up words and phrases. One thing I hate with a few mobile apps is when attempting to select text within something like a comment it instead just tries to manipulate the comment itself.

the reason i do it is to make it easier to scroll. if im reading on a large desktop screen, especially if its in portrait mode, scrolling fast can make all the text seem like a blur. so instead of having to scroll slow to keep position its quicker to highlight something and then scroll until its at the top

i should really just be hitting the spacebar but you know, old habits

> I am idly wondering about the underlying reason people do random highlighting.

I do this because I played a lot of RTS games in my childhood. Same movement for box selecting units.

In my case, it's something to play with. I need to fiddle with things. If my hand isn't on my mouse, I'm playing with my mouse wrist rest (basically a bean bag). If it is on my mouse, I'm clicking around randomly.

I'm glad there is another random highlighter out there.

Medium & kin infuriate me with the popup toolbar.

Medium and SBNation are my two worst offenders. I have custom CSS rules I install whenever I see a site do this to just hide the div they're trying to show me.

Absolutely!

The New York Times website has a similar "feature:" When the user double-clicks, the font changes size... I ended up developing an ad hoc plug-in which intercepts and suppresses the Event.

Finally someone else who's been peeved by the Times' web reader! What's worse is that it captures mouse drag, so that I can't highlight words: dragging to the sides is hijacked to load previous/next article. Terrible design.

Yes, this is very frustrating! I often select a word to mark my place when going off to do something else. Can you share your solution?

@mkl If you use Chrome desktop then see if my above post helps .. without the need for extensions/plugins.

It took me ages to figure out but there is a solution to this NYT website fubar that works for me on desktop browsers.

In Chrome this appears to be due to the Times site responding to 'touch events' when the browser reports that the device is touch capable. When the device is touch capable the double-click-on-a-word is interpreted as a zoom attempt of sorts. And right-click doesn't work either. Even if the input was with a non-touch mouse (Or maybe they're assuming everybody is using a Mac Magic Mouse always).

If you disable the touch-events-api in Chrome (chrome://flags/#touch-events) then Chrome will not report that the device is touch capable. And the NYT website will respond normally to the normal mouse interactions. This has been working for me for the past year.

As for why Chrome might be claiming your input is a touch-event ... for my situation, my best guess, so far, is that this happens since the laptop has a touchpad. (My laptop doesn't have a touch-screen.) So even though I actually used an external USB mouse to interact with the browser the browser seems to report that the device is touch capable which the NYT website interprets as must-be-touch-only-always.

Firefox has a similar setting called "dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled" I believe though I haven't tried this with FF.

Hope that helps.

Odd sidenote -- when I was growing up in the world of Mac Classics and Windows 3.1, the Mac users were the highlighters of the group. I was a Windows (okay, DOS->Windows->Linux) guy, so I didn't.

I started using OS X in around 2002 and became a highlighter. I always wondered why.

Happened to me too.

Most of us became mac users with Mac Books, and they always had an incredibly responsive touchpad.

I believe it’s enough responsive to let us express our finger tics through it. The cursor actually become an extension of the finger.

Perhaps it’s because the highlighting - being a cooler shade of blue - is less jarring and easier on the eyes.

Windows: https://www.wintools.info/images/ccp/Highlight-default.png

Mac: http://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Qu...

Current macOS user, but only a very recent convert, and I've been a highlighter as long as I can remember. Though I was previously a Linuxer, so maybe it's non-Windows or terminal correlated.

For me it was the reverse. I was a random highlighter since I was a kid on Windows machines, but after I bought my first Mac the behavior just kind of stopped.

I also had another habit I dropped, in part because Mac OS X never supported it, but on Windows I would middle click in the middle of the screen and position the cursor just under the, well, scroll anchor I guess I could call it, leaving the page to auto scroll at a comfortable speed while I took my hands off the mouse and just read. If I recall correctly, if I did it just right, then the page would not just auto scroll, but highlight everything along the way.

So interesting. I didn't know anyone did this at all until I observed a friend of mine reading something online in the early 2000s. Really curious about what percentage of web readers do this.

I'm sure the many siloed SaaS offerings with click heatmaps know, but I wonder is there an open source of such data.

I am one of these readers, and didn't realise I would do it until recently (subconsciously double clicking, on sections I am reading).

I'm glad there are others, given the (although w/ heavy selection bias) responses here on HN, there might be more than you think.

The beauty of the web is that you own the presentation tier. Anything that bothers you should beat into submission with GreaseMonkey.

Or nuclear option with NoScript to liberate yourself from these annoyances.

That'll just prevent scripting. With GreaseMonkey you can fix html and css you don't like, and have those changes made every time you visit a site.

I HATE that. Even worse are some wikis like the ROS wiki that if you click on text to highlight it, it enters edit page mode. Aghhhhh!

Fullstory tracks "rage clicks", which is a fairly noisy stat to look through, as the vast majority of these are highlighters doing their thing.

Can I ask what your goal is when highlighting? Is it based on the word or is it so you don't lose your place or what?

I only ask because I don't do it but I sometimes find it difficult to read large amounts of text on screen and I've not a quick solution to it yet. I'm curious if this would work for me.

I can't speak for everyone, but for myself and people I've discussed this with in person, it's not intentional; it's more of a tick.

That said, I find it does come in useful for keeping track.

Speaking for myself, it's completely out of my control. I highlight randomly while reading, and the highlights aren't necessarily focused on the section I'm reading. And just because I highlighted something doesn't mean I will pause and look at it. Maybe I enjoy the colored aura of highlighted text flashing and changing in my periphery. I've never seen someone in person doing it, but I've read other accounts online. And this is definitely the most I've ever thought about it.

It's interesting to read other people highlighting to keep their place. I've never thought to do that. I normally just scroll the paragraph I'm on to the top of the browser.

I do it to mark where I'm at in the post if I need to switch to something else temporarily. Makes it easier to continue from where I left of.

I know it's weird, but I actually appreciate it. Not because I find their contextual tools useful, but because it's chipping away at this annoying habit and I do it far less than I used to.

I'm curious why you think highlighting text is a bad habit. I find it useful for quickly finding my place after looking away from the screen.

It's a bad habit for me. The OP said "As someone who randomly highlights words and lines when they read" which sounded more like my own tic-like random highlighting than anything useful, like yours.

The odd thing is that I highlight lines haphazardly as well. I hate the popups on Medium because I constantly highlight text without thinking about it. At some point I noticed that it helps me keep my place as my attention bounces around. The selections seem pretty random even to me, but I'm sure there is some sort of subconscious process going on. Maybe it's the same for you? Or not. I have no idea but just thought it was kind of interesting.

I do the same thing, although I wouldn't consider it random. I use to to keep track of where I am on the page. Highlighting really helps with poorly formatted pages, where the article is too wide to comfortably read and follow onto the next line [1].

[1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Firefox reader mode is doing quite a good job for that. I suppose there's Chrome extensions that do a similar thing!

Also a hyper highlighter and I loathe those websites. It makes me want to turn off Javascript.

It gets worse, actually. People often, accidentally, click on the pen icon after highlight some text and end up highlighting that text permanently for all readers. And you, as the writer of the post, have no ability to remove that highlighting.

I would add that it has a terrible commenting navigation system.

"I did not want to post this snippet on Twitter ffs".

I know exactly what you are talking about, drives me and others insane - but I can't help it.

I actually created an account on Medium only in the hopes of finding an option to disable this horrible feature, needless to say I was disappointed!

I do that too. It also kind of makes the "popular highlights" or whatever it is kind of meaningless.

I thought I was just me that had this inexplicable habit. Glad to hear I'm not the only one.

And so easy to solve. Just add a "do not show again" option. That's it.

Am a big fan of highlighting myself, btw http://diigo.com is great for keeping the highlights (p.s. happy paid user).

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