> Carnegie Mellon University estimated the median length of a single online privacy policy, for example, to be 2,514 words. This would take 10 minutes to read.
That seems extremely generous. That's a reading rate of 252 WPM through legalese. Wikipedia[1] seems to say that studies say we can only do 180 WPM off a monitor while proofreading, presumably normal prose:
> While proofreading materials, people are able to read English at 200 WPM on paper, and 180 WPM on a monitor.
I presume legalese will take longer to comprehend. Additionally, that's the privacy policy. We need to also add in the Terms of Service:
> the iTunes Terms and Conditions fluctuated in length from 14,000 words to a whopping 23,000 words.
At the above reading speed (ignoring the fact that this is legalese) that's 1h 17m to 2h 8m of reading. The legalese will slow you down if you actual seek to comprehend the words in front of your eyes. Two-and-half to three hours of reading? The user will never read the ToS.
That seems extremely generous. That's a reading rate of 252 WPM through legalese. Wikipedia[1] seems to say that studies say we can only do 180 WPM off a monitor while proofreading, presumably normal prose:
> While proofreading materials, people are able to read English at 200 WPM on paper, and 180 WPM on a monitor.
I presume legalese will take longer to comprehend. Additionally, that's the privacy policy. We need to also add in the Terms of Service:
> the iTunes Terms and Conditions fluctuated in length from 14,000 words to a whopping 23,000 words.
At the above reading speed (ignoring the fact that this is legalese) that's 1h 17m to 2h 8m of reading. The legalese will slow you down if you actual seek to comprehend the words in front of your eyes. Two-and-half to three hours of reading? The user will never read the ToS.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_c...