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Gwen, I'd like to see citations of those studies. I posted this the
other day:
Here's a conclusion on fatigue in reading from visual display units (VDUs),
from Dillon (1994) - _Designing Usable Electronic Text_:
"It would seem safe to conclude that users do not find reading from VDUs
intrinsically fatiguing but that performance levels may be more difficult
to sustain over time when reading from average quality screens. As screen
standards increase over time this problem should be minimized."
Admittedly this is a summary statement but I didn't see any mention of
the effects you mention.
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Jim, I have no readily available citations, and even they may not be scholarly
references--I read about it in a variety of computer magazines when researching
"interlaced" vs. "non-interlaced" screens. According to what I read, (studies
had shown that) the cheaper (read "average" in your text above) interlaced
screens caused eye strain (and hence reading fatigue), because the screen
pixels had to be written _twice_ to screen to reach appropriate reading
resolution, and while this is almost always too fast for conscious awareness,
the eyes are affected by it.
Whether or not that's "intrincally fatiguing", I don't know, but I'm convinced
it's "explicitly fatiguing" ;-)
