Translations:Reading/Web/Accessibility for reading/Repository/Readability research report/25/en

Our eyes do not follow lines of text in a linear way. Instead, they make tiny jumps called saccades as they move from across a line of text. These jumps happen multiple times per second. The eyes sometimes pause on a particular set of characters for a fraction of a second before moving on. This is called a "fixation." At the end of a line of text, the eyes will perform a "return sweep" back to the beginning of the next line. While our eyes move over the text, they read the text's texture by processing whitespace around letterforms and blocks of text, as well as the shapes of characters, words, and groups of words. Our brain processes all of that visual information into words that we understand.