Make It Big!: The Effect of Font Size and Line Spacing on Online Readability

Abstract

We report from an eye-tracking experiment with 104 participants who performed reading tasks on the most popular text-heavy website of the Web: Wikipedia. Using a hybrid-measures design, we compared objective and subjective readability and comprehension of the articles for font sizes ranging from 10 to 26 points, and line spacings ranging from 0.8 to 1.8 (font: Arial). Our findings provide evidence that readability, measured via mean fixation duration, increased significantly with font size. Further, comprehension questions had significantly more correct responses for font sizes 18 and 26. For line spacing, we found marginal effects, suggesting that the two tested extremes (0.8 and 1.8) impair readability. These findings provide evidence that text-heavy websites should use fonts of size 18 or larger and use default line spacing when the goal is to make a web page easy to read and comprehend. Our results significantly differ from previous recommendations, presumably, because this is the first work to cover font sizes beyond 14 points.