[mrweasel]

Exposing text to children in context is a pretty good way for them to learn to recognize words, at least that's my experience. My kid can sort of read short words, but recognize longer words in context.

I would however agree with the article, if we were talking about adult. Previously I worked for a webshop and good percentage of our customer could not or would not read. Sure a few have honest to god dyslexia and struggle to use you site if you use to much text, but even excluding those you'd still end up with a bunch of illiterates who will ignore any amount of text and just look at the pretty pictures and price. You might as well design certain sites for the dyslexic and avoid having to attempt to provide textual guides to morons who refuse to read but will complain at any opportunity.

We where dragged to the ombudsman for a subscription service (which I'd agree was stupid, but we never attempted to trick anyone). The case was dropped when we showed that the purchasing flow said subscription and mentioned the price at least nine times before asking for your credit card info. A number of customers apparently missed that because the lower price was tied to a subscription service.

The article is correct, but it doesn't only apply to children: "Text does not actually provide guidance to a large percentage of your user base as they can’t (won't) read it"