Typographic highlighting - bionic reading

[Hondo]

I think I love you.

If you can find it, I’d love to see a copy! But the true value is in the idea. I might take a crack at something like this for the browser. I agree it could be tiring but there’s potential here.

[regulareel]

If none of you coder folks have something like this for Devember, I’d be very sad and disappointed…

[AbstractConcept]

Regarding word-scanning reading

I once saw a browser extension to do that; while it certainly is intriguing, I am not sure I would prefer to use it regularly. I would love to see it really mature as a viable tool, however.

In theory, assuming you could implement safeguards for it, you could use facial recognition and eye tracking to enhance this word-scanning method you show by pausing or slowing sentence playback when blinking or looking away.

There would need to be a method for backwards navigation as well. Playing back a sentence in reverse would not be helpful I reckon, so perhaps one would need to implement a skip backwards of n words, and then “round” to the start of the nearest sentence or phrase.

Anything with repetitive phrases would be increasingly painful to navigate, regardless of the method chosen, I predict.

Existing implementations

The GIF @MazeFrame posted looks like the output box of the One Word Reader website, though it additionally highlights the middle letter of each word.
http://onewordreader.com/
Another implementation I found does not use the two lines pointing at the middle of the word from above and below, or any decoration at all,
https://tools-unite.com/tools/speed-reading-app

[Hondo]

This is neat. It actually reminds me of the mentats (highly trained “human computers”) in the original David Lean Dune movie. We see them watching what is essentially a fast slide show of text and pictures.

I’m thinking to be well-received the user needs to feel in control of it. Forwards and backwards like you say but also the speed. There isn’t a natural interface on computers for this though - no easy analogue input device. The ideal is a foot pedal like secretaries have for typing from dictation. They speed up or slow down the speed of playback much like the foot pedal on an electric sewing machine.

Computers don’t come with those. The next best I can think of is using a trackpad. A “thermometer” by the text controls the speed of it and a scrolling motion up or down adjusts the current speed. And a motion is needed for pause. Not all computers have trackpads though. I guess it would have to be tapping keys to alter speed and do the “back sentence” / “back paragraph” shortcuts. But I don’t think skipping backwards works well because inherently with this single word approach you are disoriented the moment you lose your place. You don’t have the natural queues of a full body of text to see where you are in it. So I have a couple of ideas for that but my first is some kind of visual represenation of where you were as if the one word were a magnifying glass. You have this focus square and then the actual text is faded and moving along behind it in the background. Click outside of the box and it vanishes and leaves you in your place in the text.

You know what, I feel like writing this and I have an idea how I might do this technically where it could work with a lot of different text. I think I’ll take a stab at it.

EDIT: @AbstractConcept Your second tool is much better because it lets you add multiple words per chunk. That’s infinitely better because it leads to less disorientation and it also ties into what I said about speed reading earlier whereby people learn to absorb multiple words at once the same way a child learns to absorb multiple letters at once to recognize words rather than spell them out one by one.

[jaskij]

Looking at the example on their main website, more and more I believe I trained myself into something unusual.

I do read mostly by whole words - having trained myself to recognize words by their shape. You know those posts with jumbled letters inside the word? They won’t work for me if letters going below the baseline or “tall” letters are moved around.

Bionic Reading’s method disrupts the shape, and I have to essentially start looking past the bolding to read the text. With sufficient training, it would probably work. But it’s very different to what I’m doing now and would require a lot of retraining.

Another point is, I’m a developer, so color or styling changes usually signify end of word or other small part of text - again, very different.

[Log]

I have to agree, rather than trying to figure out how many syllables to highlight, it seems to instead be trimming off the ends of words that don’t provide anything else needed for your brain to recognize it.

Like “Time” becomes “Time”.