Online reading is not the same as reading a newspaper, book or magazine. The main reason why it is not the same are the many options that webmasters have of displaying text on their websites. They can select different fonts, font sizes, font weight, colors and many more aspects. Newspaper and books on the other hand use more or less the same kind of fonts, text sizes and margins.
Readability is a bookmarklet that aids the Internet user in improving the online reading experience. We have discussed other options before like the Tidyread add-on for the Firefox web browser or Washer which turns colors into grayscale for better readability.
Readability is a little bit different as it offers some choices during the creation of the bookmarklet. The reader can select an individual style (newspaper, ebook, novel and terminal), size (small, medium, large and extra-large) and margin (narrow, medium, wide and extra-wide) to improve online reading. The bookmarklet will use the parameters that the user selects during configuration.
But Readability will not only change the text that is displayed on the website; It will also remove all the clutter – and by all we mean everything from advertisement, sidebars and comments – from the page so that only the title, images and text remains. Below is a screenshot of the original article HP Photosmart Premium All in one of Otakugadgets.com and the same article after having used the Readability bookmarklet with the ebook, medium, medium settings.
You can configure and bookmark the Readability bookmarklet (via Shellcity) to improve online reading at the developer’s website.
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.Related Articles:
Readable Improves Online ReadabilityReadability Extension [Google Chrome]
Speed Reading Software ReadPal
Readability Firefox Add-On
Enable Readability Statistics In Microsoft Word
Nice one. I did large post on bookmarklets for better reading (can’t-believe-you-missed-that ;) and this one I deemed best for desktop use.
Only downside it sometimes loses part or all of images in post when reformating.
Opera users have a similar feature built-in called “User Mode”. It’s in the View menu IIRC, and can be a button on the toolbar.
This could complement it nicely by allowing you to have multiple modes, just create a bookmarklet for each mode you want.
It seems to as if this only works when deactivating the “noscript” addon.
Can anyone confirm. If yes its alittle uncomfortable when u have to temporarily allow the website u one visits.
But other then that a great addon. Thx
Jeff, yes as I said in the review, you need to enable scripts for the root domain of the webpage you want to use Readability on, e.g. for ghacks.net if you want to use it here on this page.
Sorry Martin, must have overlooked that detail in ur article. Tidyread seems to work differently then i guess. At least for me it works fien with noscript.