Plain Language Translations of American Divorce Law
169concerned about presenting good user interfaces for webpages. In the
United States, the faculty members at graduate information schools (which
have generally replaced the schools of library and information science)
have substantially advanced the literature, as have the many corporations
that employ their schools’ graduates. Some have borrowed from the work of
cognitive linguists, while many have used the experimental techniques of
cognitive psychology. Of course, when experiments are set up on computer
terminals, the use of eye movement studies is substantially easier. The
tremendous wealth created by the computer information industry has
certainly contributed to the availability of research funds for usability
studies.
Layout
Transcend states that court forms should be nearly as easy to read as
printed advertisements. They should be immediately comprehensible. For
readers of English, the item read first is that presented in the upper left
corner. In Washington State, supreme court rules require that the top three
inches of a document be left blank for clerical processing (Washington
State Courts 2008). For the new Washington State court forms, the Pro Se
Project had hoped alter the caption portion of the form (a space with a
specified layout suitable for OCR processing) so that the names of the
parties and the jurisdiction would be on to the right side and the title of the
form on the left side. Unfortunately, to do so would have cost the courts
considerable expense in revising software. So a compromise was reached.
Although somewhat simplified, the caption portion remains the same, but
the title is now repeated in big, bold font, centered, just below the caption.
This compromise has proven to work in field tests and surveys (Dyer et al.
2014).
The State of California, which had also employed Transcend for this
work, also tried to reorganize the caption space at the beginning of a form.
Believe it or not, they found in field tests that the form looked so much
unlike a governmental form that non-specialists questioned whether it was
a valid form. Evidently, a form will not work if it is too informal.
Transcend has also noted that, while additional white space adds to the
number of pages on longer forms, pages with sufficient white space reduce
eyestrain and are easier to comprehend. For the Pro Se Project in
Washington State, much of the added white space was put between the
steps in the form. Surprisingly, judges appreciated the added space, not
only because it saves their eyes, but they used the space for making notes.