All caps text?

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 Hillary Russak <<asked one of [her] authors to change
 the mixed-case portion of her form to all-caps, based on
 [her] impression that the all-caps version on the
 "instructions" page was more readable.>>

 A mixture of upper and lower-case letters is always more
 readable than pure all-caps. You can prove this by holding
 a piece of paper across the top or bottom half of a
 sentence composed entirely in caps and asking someone (or
 yourself, if you can manage to forget the sentence for long
 enough) to try to figure out what the sentence says. Now do
 the same with upper and lower case. The difference in
 legibility is so striking that you can actually take a
 black marker and blot out the letters by drawing entirely
 within their boundaries; the silhouettes that result are
 essentially unreadable with all-caps, but you can often
 puzzle them out in mixed-case text.

 Having said that, let's return to your context (a form). In
 a form, it's unlikely you'll have more than a word or two
 at a time, and nobody will be reading the form as if it
 were a novel or a manual. In that case, the difference in
 legibility and reading speed is probably insignificant,
 even if mixed case text would be clearer. If you do go with
 all caps, choose a serif font or a variable-stroke-width
 sans serif that makes the letters distinct.

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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