The white space in our template is a result of adhering to the best practices for optimizing readability for users as established by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.
- "For people with some reading or vision disabilities, long lines of text can become a significant barrier. They have trouble keeping their place and following the flow of text. Having a narrow block of text makes it easier for them to continue on to the next line in a block. Lines should not exceed 80 characters or glyphs (40 if CJK), where glyphs are the element of writing in the writing system for the text."
As default, Canvas/Blackboard fills the landscape with text resulting in line lengths that are a foot wide on monitors, which violates the aforementioned best practices for comfortable reading. To comply, we have set the content width to 38 ems, enabling approximately 80 characters per line, a standard followed by most online publications.