Last week, Karen Janowski shared a terrific resource that has potential to help the many learners who are hindered by distracting clutter on web pages. I want to echo Karen’s find here for anyone who may have missed it on her blog.
Readability does a remarkably effective job of removing the distracting clutter that can make it difficult for many readers to focus on the primary content on a web page. This application could not be any easier to install or use.
Set the type-style, text-size, and margin-width. Then drag and drop a bookmarklet onto the bookmark toolbar of your browser. Click on this book marklet when you want to remove clutter from a web page, and it’s gone. To change the settings, simply right-click on the bookmarklet to delete it. You can then go to the Readability site, select the settings you want, and add a new book marklet.
Contrast the before and after screen shots of the same web page below.
March 10, 2009 at 9:28 am
Paul,
Thanks for including this info. Clutter is such a huge issue for some folks with reading disabilities. One question that I have, for anyone, is how do all these additions we find work together. For example, I have qtl. I”m sure I have done other things to this machine that I don’t even remember, also. Is there a place that warns about incompatibility?
Thanks!
March 10, 2009 at 2:32 pm
It looks good but I couldn’t get it to work…It wouldn’t let me drag it to the toolbar . The link told me to right click and save it to favorites but – iIcouldn’t get it to work… any one have any ideas…?
March 10, 2009 at 4:15 pm
That is absolutely awesome and will certainly help my daughter be able to read and process the pages better. I have already added to my browser. Thanks for sharing that!
March 11, 2009 at 9:20 am
Judy: I’ve only tried using Readability in Firefox, and it seems to work fine. I did find, however, that I could only drag the bookmarklet to the Bookmarks Toolbar. It wouldn’t work if I tried placing it anywhere else. I hope you get this to work because it is a very helpful application! –Paul
March 12, 2009 at 6:49 pm
I couldn’t believe it when you told me that you can bring these de-cluttered pages into Kurzweil with the KESI virtual printer! That’s amazing and I can hardly wait to try it.
March 15, 2009 at 2:06 am
Paul, you may want to try TidyRead. It has accuracy to extract articles and supports different languages.
March 15, 2009 at 10:42 am
TidyRead: Thanks for your comment. I’ve checked out your service, and I’m really impressed. I’ll try to write a post about it in the near future. –Paul