InquiryLabs
Politics, Programming and Possibilities
Speed reading app
Author: Duane Johnson16 Aug
I recently learned that the primary inhibitor for speeding up our reading is the mechanical movement of our eyes (saccades), so I had this idea to make the text move past your eyes rather than your eyes move past the text. The result is this little speed reading app I made in html/javascript. It’s probably not original (I was influenced by other things I’ve seen, but can’t recall where). Nevertheless, I thought you might like it too.
Just load up the text you want to read into the “source.txt” file. Save it and then open “speed.html” in a browser (I tested it in Firefox). Adjust the slider to the reading speed you’re comfortable with.
5 Responses for "Speed reading app"
This is a web app that does the same thing. Probably where you saw it or drew inspiration from before.
http://www.spreeder.com/
Nate
@Nate: Yes! That was the inspiration. I saw it some time ago, but didn’t like the one-word-at-a-time limitation. I wanted to use more of my peripheral vision. Anyway, thanks for bringing that to my attention–spreeder definitely deserves credit here
Love it. I can’t wait until eInk gets a refresh rate that will support this app. I just can’t handle reading on most of today’s screens for too long.
Nice work Duane.
@Neal: I can’t wait! Won’t it be neat to have colorful, indirect displays?
[...] rolled the experimental javascript “speed reading” code (that I wrote a couple of days ago) into a more polished Ubiquity command this evening. [...]
Leave a reply