[HN Gopher] Show HN: Bionic Reading - Formats text to make it fa...
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Show HN: Bionic Reading - Formats text to make it faster to read
Author : renato_casutt
Score : 346 points
Date : 2022-03-24 08:04 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bionic-reading.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bionic-reading.com)
| Terretta wrote:
| Site images blocked for me, and no examples in HTML.
|
| Looks like "shortpixel.ai" blocked by AdGuard Base.
|
| "Data on Swiss servers", but shortpixel.com and shortpixel.ai
| owned by ID Scout of Romania. Their Wordpress plugin and CDN both
| superficially 'act like' plenty of free beacon tracker type image
| hosts, though this service offers paid plans and copy paste data
| legalese doesn't reference advertising/measurement/aggregation
| third parties.
|
| I haven't the time to look into why AdGuard is blocking, but
| perhaps it's that ad banner or ad injector companies like it:
|
| https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/search?q=short...
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Honestly fixed word length per column independent of device or
| screen size is the #1 feature I wish for. I can't stand flow
| templates. When the nature of the paragraph changes per device
| it's very hard feel like you've been there before.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Wow, I want to patent 2 + 2 = 4
| numlock86 wrote:
| What's your point? If you are implying the patent is just about
| ceil(len*0.3) you completely missed the application. In
| contrast, if you make/invent something new that uses 2+2=4 as
| an underlying fundamental mechanism, go ahead.
| qnsi wrote:
| can you share some kind of science that it works?
| renato_casutt wrote:
| We have just finished a study. The publication still needs some
| time. But I can already say in advance that 25% of the subjects
| get great benefits in the method.
|
| My finding before the study was that 10% of all readers gain an
| advantage in Bionic Reading. And 10% is already very much...I
| find
| suriyaG wrote:
| 10% of all readers find how much increase in reading speed?
| also, how is the recollection and retainability of the
| information?
| dugmartin wrote:
| A small observation: all the "normal" sample text has low
| contrast with the page background and the kerning seems awfully
| narrow making it harder, for me at least, to read than normal
| text. I tried to inspect the text to play with the css but alas,
| the text is an image and doesn't allow experimentation. I did run
| it though Chrome's Lighthouse accessibility check and it agreed
| about the lack of contrast.
| masters3d wrote:
| How long will it take for your brain to start considering this
| text representation as regular text block?
| kranner wrote:
| I have some feedback regarding the testimonial from "Sangeeth",
| whose Memoji shows a Sikh person. Did the user choose their
| Memoji? The two don't go together well for reasons of odd
| cultural differences in the Roman/Latin transliteration of sounds
| in the south and the north of India. The -th- cluster represents
| the dental t, IPA /t/, but only in South India. In the North the
| same sound is represented by -t-. Therefore you might find a Sikh
| named Sangeet, or a non-Sikh named Sangeeth, but a Sikh named
| Sangeeth? I've never seen a Sikh name using the -th- cluster in
| my life. There are Sikhs who grow up in South India of course but
| their names use the North Indian transliteration rules.
|
| What I'm trying to say is: if you chose the Memoji with a turban
| to show an Indian person, it doesn't match the -th in the name.
| As an Indian my first reaction was that the testimonial was fake,
| for this reason.
| dymk wrote:
| It's just an emoji, not a Memoji (https://emojipedia.org/man-
| wearing-turban-medium-dark-skin-t...)
|
| It's probably a review written by somebody with a brown skin
| tone. Page authors don't know the social intricacies of what
| constitutes Sikhs and chose this one as "close enough".
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| There's probably some sort of important lesson here...
| oauea wrote:
| Yes, such as stop fixating so much on race or ethnicity and
| instead appreciate the product for what it is.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Thank you. I didn't find the energy to put it into words
| when I first commented. I yearn for this world.
| dymk wrote:
| Maybe, but Sangeeth is not here to tell us if they are Sikh
| or not, so it's hard to say.
|
| I think it's unfortunate that (at the time of writing) the
| comments about the product and its effectiveness are ranked
| lower than this discussion about the _possibility_ that a
| non-Sikh person has been represented as Sikh.
|
| If Sangeeth themselves had popped up in this thread to
| comment on the choice of emoji, then sure, but it's just
| somebody making some assumptions based on a 't' vs 'th'
| cluster in the name.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Oh I agree, the lesson learned should be: let's not spend
| our attention on race and identity because it leads to
| these bizarre situations among many other things. I
| barely understand how we ended up like this.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Hi kranner I didn't mean to offend you. Or misrepresent the
| culture with a memoji. Sorry. If you feel it's out of order,
| then I can change it too. But what is more crucial for me is
| what Sangeeth said. And that is more important to me. By the
| way, all testimonials are real. 100%
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Hi kranner I didn't mean to offend you. Or misrepresent the
| culture with a memoji. Sorry. If you feel it's out of order,
| then I can change it too. But what is more crucial for me is
| what Sangeeth said. And that is more important to me. By the
| way, all testimonials are real. 100%
|
| I think that the general idea is that either you're guessing
| at the appropriate representation of the testifying users, or
| that they've picked those emoji. If the latter, then all is
| good! If the former, then it's generally a bad idea to assume
| that you know something about a person based on their name,
| or even, really, anything other than their implicit election.
| (I would certainly be upset if a business to whom I had
| offered a testimonial used it and misidentified me, even in
| ways that may seem trivial, especially if they could have
| just asked me.)
| renlo wrote:
| In addition to pronouns, let's include emojis that we feel
| identify ourselves
| JadeNB wrote:
| > In addition to pronouns, let's include emojis that we
| feel identify ourselves
|
| I assume that was sarcastic, but why not? Do you have any
| right to choose the emoji to identify me? I mean, you
| surely have every right to editorialise with an emoji
| that you think reflects my behaviour, but, if you're
| going to quote me below a symbolic representation, then I
| think it's different. If one _has_ to use an emoji to
| identify someone--and it 's not at all clear to me that
| it's necessary--then, after all, we're talking about who
| has reached out; why not just ask them?
|
| (For example, surely--right?--we can agree that it would
| be bad to say "a user from India gave this testimonial:",
| or whatever--unless the place of origin is relevant, and
| you actually know it. I don't see much difference between
| these two.)
| oauea wrote:
| > Do you have any right to choose the emoji to identify
| me
|
| If it's posted on my website, then yes. It might not be
| polite or advisable, but I absolutely have the right to
| misgender you as well.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| Let's just take the emojis away if we all can't get along
| with them.
| JadeNB wrote:
| It certainly seems clear that renato_cassutt, who it is
| clear can taken constructive criticism and who has given
| very useful replies throughout the comments, meant no-one
| any harm; and neither I nor, I am sure, kranner meant to
| impute any ill intent. I can understand the appeal of
| pictorial representations of one's users; I was just, and
| I suspect that kranner was also, trying to mention the
| possible _inadvertent_ offence that might result in this
| way, not to ruin anyone 's fun but to save someone from
| an inadvertent misstep.
| Xophmeister wrote:
| I wonder if "word" is the correct unit, here; perhaps "morpheme"
| would work better, especially for multi-morphemic words or in
| compound nouns (e.g., in German). I think "syllable" may be a bit
| too much, unless the purpose was to teach reading. For example:
| ANTIDISESTAblishmentarianism (initial 40% highlighted)
| vs. ANtiDisESTAblishMEntARianIsm (highlighting rules
| over morphemes) vs.
| AnTiDisEstAbLIshMEntArIAnIsm (highlighting rules over syllables)
|
| An API that provided this as a service would be less trivial.
|
| The lay-typographer in me really hates the look of it too.
| Aesthetics don't trump readability, but perhaps there's a middle
| ground where the font weight drops off (e.g., with exponential
| decay), rather than having the binary "bold vs. not bold".
| neilwilson wrote:
| Reminds me of the tricks in Buzan's Speed Reading Book[0] but
| using a computer rather than a stylus to guide the eye.
|
| [0] https://tonybuzan.com/product/the-speed-reading-book/
| visarga wrote:
| I prefer TTS with 1.5x speed coupled with highlighting the
| current words, and restyling the text to have 160% line height.
| There's something about having both the sound and visual at the
| same time that allows deeper concentration.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Tbh I scrolled down the page reading (and checked the about
| section), and am still none the wiser as to what exactly is
| supposed to be happening process-wise, and - assuming I'm
| supposed to be reading things more deeply, what the evidence for
| that is.
|
| At the very least I think that should all be clearer given the
| primary claim.
| simonhamp wrote:
| Not sure if this intentional or just because this site is
| unfinished, but the repetition of the same paragraph throughout
| the page probably has the effect of making you believe you've
| read it faster, but it's more likely just recent familiarity of
| those words in that order that is allowing your brain to skip
| ahead rather than a specific visual cue.
|
| I actually found the 'bumpiness' in reading a distraction and I
| had to read the paragraph a few times to truly get the meaning.
| So any speed gains from the reading methodology were lost during
| the understanding phase
| btbuildem wrote:
| I had the same suspicion -- I think they'd do better to have
| different snippets of text across the different examples.
| xnorswap wrote:
| I'd like to try this as an option in firefox's reader mode as
| that's the format in which I read most long texts.
|
| This did on the surface feel like it is a help for me, in
| particular not so much the reading speed but the 'pull' of the
| words meant I was less likely to get distracted halfway through a
| paragraph and tab away. (Yes, I suspect I may have undiagnosed
| adhd).
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Just use hexomancer's script. Paste it into the Firefox
| console, call bionifyPage(), switch to reader mode.
| tksb wrote:
| Interesting! I've been using this casually on iOS (via Reeder
| [1]) for at least a year. One thing that absolutely flips the
| effect on it's head (for me, personally) is the switch to "dark"
| mode, or simply light text on dark backgrounds vs. dark text on
| light backgrounds.
|
| I suspect this is likely a typographic side-effect, similar to
| traditional print where dark pages "swallow" light text where as
| the opposite happens when inverted.
|
| [1] https://www.reederapp.com
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > Bionic reading aims to encourage a more in-depth reading and
| understanding of written content
|
| by reading faster? I mean the examples are pretty compelling and
| it did feel like I was reading faster, but at the same time their
| goals are at odds - faster reading doesn't necessarily mean more
| attentive reading, or being able to absorb more information.
|
| Still, interesting technique. I just wish they made their
| examples / comparisons actual text instead of images; surely they
| can just write a snippet of JS or some HTML to render the effect
| in the browser itself. Or would that be giving up their secret
| sauce?
|
| Also if any of the authors are here, please get rid of the "small
| text in between big text", I'm not sure if I need to read the one
| and then the other, or refocus my eyes on the big then the small
| text.
| kizer wrote:
| I had better comprehension on the Bionic text right off the
| bat, personally.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I'm on mobile so maybe that is why, but I noticed that I
| skipped over the sentence a bit. As in, I didn't notice the
| periods and comma at first. Would bolding the punctuation
| marks cause any issues?
| Llamamoe wrote:
| I think the less friction there is between the words on a
| screen and you having them in your head, the more readily
| you're going to absorb it. And attention is a demanding
| resource to expend, even if non-ADHD people don't notice it due
| to having ample supply.
|
| But yes, this would be awesome to see as a browser extension.
| Maybe I'll get around to it at some distant point in the
| future.
| smithza wrote:
| As another comment said, this would be good for those with
| short attention spans or those with reading disabilities like
| dislexia to focus better. I would want to see an epub renderer
| so I can read ebooks with this method.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I saw it as "reading with less effort" and "faster" is kind of
| a shorthand for "less likely to get bored waiting for my eyes
| to catch up".
|
| I'd be more likely to read a longer piece of text (average
| content, not something I'm deeply interested in) if it was
| "easier" to read -- I get through it faster, or have to make
| less effort to get to the end.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| It was explained in the link title before the change - their
| hypothesis is that our eyes are the bottleneck - the brain can
| understand more quickly than we can read. So by speeding up our
| eyes, we can understand more information.
| FrankZappa42 wrote:
| Is this similar to open dyslexic font? Or are open dyslexic font
| based on this?
| renato_casutt wrote:
| But Bionic Reading actually supports many people who have
| dyslexia.
|
| However, not in the form of a font, but in the way of
| highlighting within the text.
|
| A big advantage of Bionic Reading is that the reading setting
| can be adjusted individually by each reader. In other words,
| individual.
| DelightOne wrote:
| What's the pricing on this?
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Are there more examples, perhaps with a smaller font?
| btbuildem wrote:
| I like how this leverages the fact we don't have to read the
| entire word, or that letters in the middle of the word can be
| jumbled and we still read it correctly.
|
| Very cool insight in emphasizing the "important" parts of the
| words. For me at least, it seems to have worked - it felt like
| less effort to glide over the paragraph of text and take in the
| content.
|
| As far as it becoming a product.. I'm sorry, but people will
| immediately rip this off. Someone will make a free browser
| extension, or add this to an existing one like Outline / Mercury
| Reader / etc. To enforce patents you have to have money to pay
| the lawyers, so for small fry they're kind of useless.
|
| Very cool idea all the same, and I would love to see this
| embedded in anything that displays text.
| krelian wrote:
| The samples are impressive. I would love to have some longer text
| to see how it really works and feels. Maybe apply it to some
| public domain text?
| monkeydust wrote:
| I have started to watch more videos at > real-time speeds.
|
| Depends on the quality of the video but can get at least x1.25
| and upto x1.75 without my brain frying.
|
| Instead of reading what if this was text->speech at a multiple?
| quaintdev wrote:
| I follow this for Udemy/YouTube videos
| mrgill wrote:
| My default for watching any video is 2.0x. Up to 3.0x/3.5x.
| matsemann wrote:
| I just wish most software were smarter about the speed ups.
| Naively playing everything X times faster can be weird. Either
| the pauses are too short, the words spoken too fast, or
| something. But it should dynamically stretch and squish more, I
| feel, to make it sound like a person actually speaking faster.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > I have started to watch more videos at > real-time speeds.
|
| I started doing this too.
|
| But mostly because it helps with those videos where the speaker
| is speaking about an interesting topic but is speaking very
| slowly, or with large gaps or with many fillers. It helps
| making the viewing experience much more bearable.
| mihaic wrote:
| While in general I find that speedreading is mostly for poor
| content, since our speed of information comprehension is slower
| than any reading, this seems to be the most effective
| implementation I've come across.
|
| It might help the website more if the testimonials themselves
| were in the same way.
| mmargerum wrote:
| Coulda just had a simple demo on the landing page. I spent the
| requisite 2 minutes trying to figure out what you do and didn't
| figure it out.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I really quite like both the idea and the website.
|
| Suggestion: on the EN version of the website, you could consider
| linking to EN App Store pages, e.g.,
| https://apps.apple.com/app/fiery-feeds-rss-reader/id1158763303
|
| instead of https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/fiery-
| feeds-rss-reader/id1158763303
| sdoering wrote:
| I was actually not able to read their example text at all. I had
| to slow down, to read this slowly word, by word.
|
| I trained myself since my time at university to mark important
| parts in text (either with text marker in a book or with bold
| typesetting in a digital text).
|
| I then primarily scan only the bold/colored parts and skip over
| the non marked parts. So my eye/brain jumped from bold letters to
| bold letters. As these were not full words, I just had gibberish
| in my head.
|
| Maybe for the untrained reader this might work. I know that I am
| just anecdata.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I feel like I am "consuming" the words quickly, but there is no
| room for my brain to think.
| enduku wrote:
| Great work, congrats! Another app Beeline Reader[0] seems a lot
| similar to this. It was launched many years ago I suppose. All
| the best with the product!
|
| [0] https://www.beelinereader.com/
| gnicholas wrote:
| BeeLine founder here -- I'd say we are similar in that we both
| work to improve visual tracking and speed up the reading
| process. BeeLine's focus is perhaps more on return sweeps, but
| in the grand scheme of things, we're both pushing in the same
| direction!
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what exactly does BeeLine do, and how have
| you developed it?
|
| It seems to color the beginning and end of each line, so that
| your eyes naturally follow from one line to the next, is this
| correct?
|
| Have you tried and tested any other ideas?
| gnicholas wrote:
| BeeLine improves visual tracking by displaying text with a
| color gradient, which wraps from the end of one line to the
| beginning of the next. Like Bionic Reader, it improves
| visual tracking across the line.
|
| It also improves visual tracking during the 'return sweep'
| -- when you move your eyes from right to left, to find the
| new line.
|
| The colors are user-configurable, and we make first-party
| tools like browser plugins, [1] PDF converters, [2] and iOS
| apps. [3] We also partner with reading and education
| platforms like Blackboard [4], who have embedded our tech
| in their products.
|
| We do have a few other tricks up our sleeve, but for now
| this is the main event. It's not too shabby, and has won
| social impact awards from MIT Solve [5] and the United
| Nations Solutions Summit. [6]
|
| 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-
| reader/ifj...
|
| 2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-
| reader-pdf...
|
| 3: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beeline-
| extension/id1571623734
|
| 4: https://ally.ac/covid19
|
| 5: https://solve.mit.edu/articles/meet-the-solver-teams-
| introdu...
|
| 6: https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/meet-10-solution-
| makers-t...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Why are you patenting ~"Highlight the first half of a printed
| word", Renato? Do you think that is patent material?
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Hi mdp2021 I understand your skepticism. The point is that the
| reader needs a fixed point to absorb the text. That's why this
| definition is placed. As shared in other comments, I
| unfortunately had to make very bad experiences. And the
| responsibility I perceive among others Marco (feedback
| website), I do not want to jeopardize. But I understand your
| objections.
|
| Best regards from the Alps Renato
| Llamamoe wrote:
| How do you decide which letters to highlight? Is it the first
| half in every case? Did you conduct any trials to see whether
| this yields the fastest reading speeds?
| swissmanu wrote:
| Using Bionic Reading with Reeder on my iPad since the people
| behind these products decided to collaborate. Great stuff <3
| ada1981 wrote:
| Surely someone can do thus in CSS?
| drenvuk wrote:
| I like this. I've always had to force jumping down line by line
| to pick up words if I was trying to speed read, but with the
| extra highlighting I'm picking them out and jumping almost
| effortlessly. It's pretty neat.
|
| I'm honestly wondering if this would make me lazy for reading non
| explicitly partway bolded text.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| I am very happy to hear that. I don't think you will have
| problems if you can't apply BR. But you will probably find that
| the "reading pull" is less strong without Bionic Reading.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| This seems obvious from the fact I love listening to audio books
| at 1.75-3x speed but hate actually reading because the latter
| feels too slow. It even feels hard to me to understand the
| information (let alone concentrate the attention) at the speed so
| low as the eyes can supply.
| krzysztof wrote:
| I do hope that kindle and other ebook readers will incorporate
| your tech. Awesome idea!
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| Are there any specific, measurable claims (and evidence) being
| made here with regards to what this supposed to achieve?
| "[Encouraging] a more in depth reading and understanding of
| written content" is pretty vague. Does it help with recall?
| Memorization etc. Personally it reads like those "dyslexic" fonts
| which actually make reading harder for a lot of people.
| osullip wrote:
| I was very impressed. To the point where I got scared about how
| fast I could read and if I was losing control of the content
| going into my brain.
|
| Is there an app that can 'un-bolden' letters so I can slow my
| brain back down.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Hahaha... yes unfortunately there are countless apps that gum
| up and slow down the brain.
| folli wrote:
| This reminds me of BeeLine Reader: https://www.beelinereader.com/
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| I wonder how messy it would look to combine the two? BeeLine
| really works, especially in cases where the designer has
| disregarded the need for reasonable column widths. I feel this
| works too, but as with BeeLine the visual appearance is a bit
| jarring at first.
| gnicholas wrote:
| BeeLine founder here; interested to see this. My first reaction
| was that the "before" text in the before/after demonstration is
| both thin and grey.
|
| It is well known that text that is too thin and too light-
| colored is not great to read. The text modification shown here
| makes certain letters easier to read, but it appears this is
| partially because the rest of the text is specifically
| difficult to read. The background of the page very light grey,
| it looks like, which would magnify this effect even more.
|
| I wonder what this would look like with a not-too-thin-font
| that is black or near-black. I also wonder what it looks like
| on a full-width paragraph, as the sibling commenter mentioned.
|
| Regardless, it's always nice to see innovation in this space!
| sweetheart wrote:
| I found this to be an unbelievable improvement in reading for me.
| It was automatic and effortless. I cannot believe how much faster
| that helped me to read without sacrificing on comprehension.
|
| Unreal. Reading the non-bionic (?) text on the website suddenly
| felt like a sluggish chore, and for the first time I am realizing
| that I am actively using not insignificant amounts of energy to
| mentally parse text.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Hi sweetheart I am very happy about that. Nice that you get the
| "reading pull" and thereby gain the benefits. Best regards from
| the Alps, Renato
| darau1 wrote:
| My first thought was "is there an emacs mode?"
| manbash wrote:
| For me at least, it made little difference. My brain refused to
| ignore the parts that aren't boldened.
|
| I think what I don't understand is the concept: "and so just a
| few letters are enough to recognize whole word".
|
| This isn't expressed in the example. The rest of the word isn't
| hidden, it's still there in my peripheral vision (?). It is
| basically the same as I normally read.
|
| If the unboldened parts of the words were actually discarded, I
| am not sure if I would be able to recognize all the original
| words, at least not efficiently and faster than the original.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| You never look at every single character while reading, your
| eyes only dart between select tokens. Your peripheral vision
| and your brain fills in the blanks. I think the idea is to aid
| your brain quickly parsing these tokens.
|
| A nice side effect is that it also helps your vertical tracking
| of lines by adding more visual anchor points.
| jvalencia wrote:
| I'd love to see an Android app in the list.
| j_san wrote:
| Props for the GDPR compliant Cookie decline button! :)
| sdoering wrote:
| Are there any actual studies on the gained speed being done by
| Independent scientists? I could not finde anything on their
| (quite beautifully done) marketing/landing page.
|
| I see patent registrations, but no mention of any studies
| underpinning the claims being made.
|
| To me this smells like all the other pseudo-scientific BS
| marketing and product people are trying to spoon-feed me every
| day.
|
| Also as said in a sibling comment, for me it killed my reading
| speed. From their examples I would estimate by about half.
|
| So thanks, but no thanks - this is not an offering for me. But it
| will probably find its audience. I could imagine it will be a big
| hit in the self optimization scene.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| We have just completed the preliminary study but I cannot
| publish any results yet. And you are right, of course. It does
| not help everyone. That's the way it is. But there is a lot of
| feedback thanking us and hoping that it will be available to as
| many services as possible.
| sdoering wrote:
| I don't doubt that this will help people. I know how it
| helped me to train myself in the way I read today during my
| university years.
|
| So as said - there will be people who benefit from this.
| Still - being an empiricist I just like to see independent
| and scientifically valid representative studies being done
| before I believe marketing claims. ;-)
| tarsinge wrote:
| I don't have links to studies but last time I checked and from
| anecdotal experience reading speed with high comprehension is
| limited by information throughput in the brain. It's also why
| languages spoken faster carry less information per word,
| because the limit is information processing. To experience that
| if you are a good reader, you can try to speak out loud a
| sentence while memorizing a second sentence and see that you'll
| not have process and understand the words until you have spoken
| them, even if you have read and stored them (short sentences
| like in TFA, obviously doesn't work on HN).
| camhart wrote:
| Just reading the example paragraph, I did feel at times speed was
| increased, but there were times the highlighted letters caused my
| brain to assume the wrong word, and when that happened it took
| extra effort (& time) to focus on the actual word.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Yes I understand that. Optimal is then if you have set your
| individual reading setting with Bionic Reading.
|
| And what you have to remember is that your brain has already
| absorbed the words. So your eye jumps back instead of gliding
| over the text.
|
| However, this will turn off and you will find that you
| understand the text without having read every letter.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Have you considered tweaking the highlight length when the
| bold part is itself a complete word?
|
| For example with 'theists', 'the' would be bold by default,
| but maybe bolding 'th' or 'thei' would result in less
| confusion.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| Perfect example of why algorithms shouldn't be patentable
| shgidi wrote:
| It look very cool. Is there any browser addon?
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Actually this made it harder for me to read. The text felt
| "bumpy", unlike normal in text where it felt smoother and
| flowing. Maybe it's just a matter of habit.
|
| Anyways, I don't believe speed-reading to be effective,
| especially for comprehension and long-term retention. The best
| and fastest way to get an overview of a written piece is not to
| read it faster, but to skip most of the content. Most of it is
| just supporting the core arguments, and can thus be skipped for
| an overview.
| layer8 wrote:
| It felt like listening to speech with constantly changing
| volume. Probably because bold is associated with
| shouting/strong emphasis.
| corobo wrote:
| I'd say it almost halves my reading speed. In regards to speed
| reading I've always been under the impression it means you take
| in entire lines/sentences in one go rather than reading faster,
| skipping the sub-vocalisation step. For instance the homepage
| of HN is a quick scan vertically down the page until a headline
| catches my eye as interesting, no real side to side eye
| movement needed unless the title is a bit long
|
| Maybe this brain reading faster than eyes thing is best aimed
| at sub-vocalisers? I'd be interested in knowing if the people
| this helps read 'out loud' in their heads
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Yes, corobo that can be that it prevents you from reading.
| However, I would argue that you are a speed reader.
|
| One test person in the study was also a speed reader. She had
| read two different texts. Once with and once without bionic
| reading. But her speed stayed at 800 wpm each time.
|
| But believe me, there are a lot of people who have difficulty
| with reading. Surely also in your circle of friends. And for
| some of them Bionic Reading can help.
| DantesKite wrote:
| I felt the same way. It slows me down. But I imagine it would
| be very useful for dyslexic people. I have a family member who
| struggles to read; it's as if they have to consciously process
| what each character means. From that perspective, it's not so
| much speed reading, but bringing up people with slow reading to
| normal levels.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| I've used both Bionic Reading while on Reeder, and the Open
| Dyslexic font while on Kindle, for several years to similar
| effect.
|
| My personal finding is that it makes the work my eyes need to do
| to keep on the line, and move from line to line easier.
|
| But I will note that the largest increase in reading speed for
| me, up to 800 words per minute, came from single word focusing.
| There are tools, such as speed reader mode in Emacs, or an old
| browser extension called Squid, that take the readable text and
| put it all on one line, then move the text through a window that
| stays fixed on the screen.
|
| By training yourself to relax and not read the words aloud, I was
| able to increase my reading speed from around 200 wpm to over 800
| wpm. The trick is to slowly ramp up the speed, and not just jump
| up to the fastest speed possible. It's also important to remember
| to blink.
|
| Alternatively, text to speech works for to in a similar way, and
| I've found that I can handle 2.5x - 3.5x speeds after a few hours
| of training. As a bonus, nobody else can decider what you're
| listening to, and you get some funny looks.
|
| Let me know if others have found similar techniques to work for
| them.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how do dyslexic friendly fonts work? Are they
| easier for everyone, or is it a case of compensating dyslexia
| related deficits specifically?
| gnicholas wrote:
| There are a couple popular dyslexic-friendly fonts,
| OpenDyslexic [1] and Dyslexie. [2] My understanding is that
| the first is free and the second is not.
|
| What they have in common is that both are quite heavy fonts
| (thick lines), and with a bit of extra kerning (space between
| letters). They are also designed to have 'b' and 'd' (and
| other mirror-image pairs) that do not look like mirror
| images.
|
| I have worked in this field for years, as the founder of
| BeeLine Reader. [3] We received a lot of requests to offer
| one of these fonts, and we've used OpenDyslexic for quite
| some time. I know some people really like it. At the same
| time, dyslexia researchers (especially those in the US)
| insist that dyslexia is not a visual condition, and that
| fonts cannot make a difference.
|
| I tend to believe that even if it is not an issue that is
| primarily visual, that doesn't meant that adjustments to how
| text is presented can't make things better. This seems to be
| the sense among (1) researchers outside the US, (2)
| individuals with dyslexia worldwide, and (3) many assistive
| technology or SPED workers in the US -- despite what US-based
| researchers say.
|
| 1: https://opendyslexic.org/
|
| 2: https://www.dyslexiefont.com/
|
| 3: https://www.beelinereader.com
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Do you have any other assistive technology examples other
| than beeline reader? That thing is absolutely fantastic, I
| love it.
| gnicholas wrote:
| You could check out Helperbird, which offers various
| readability tweaks. [1]
|
| Glad you like BeeLine -- we've integrated with several
| HN/YC'ers, ranging from blogs [2] to mobile apps. [3]
| Please feel free to reach out
| (developer@beelinereader.com) if you're interested in
| working together.
|
| 1: https://www.helperbird.com/
|
| 2: https://wildcardpeople.com/what-is-a-wildcard-person
|
| 3: https://insightbrowser.com/collections/reading
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Speaking of listening to sped up speech, I wonder if there's
| any tricks like BR possible for speech. Hm.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm amazed at how much clearer the bionic-highlighted text is.
| For me the big difference was in first-pass comprehension, not
| speed.
|
| The website needs more attention to detail, this typo is one of
| the first things a visitor sees: > We humans
| store learned words and so just a few letters are enough to
| ecognize whole words.
| e12e wrote:
| Maybe the paragraph is intentionally autological - but then I'd
| expect more misspellings...
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Thank you for your feedback.
|
| Sorry for the error. My english is not so good. Can you write
| me the sentence 100% correctly? That would be very kind of you.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| ecognize should be recognize
| dotancohen wrote:
| I see that you've already got an answer to what needs to be
| corrected.
|
| If you would like, send to me an email (my gmail username is
| the same as my HN username) and if I spot anything else I'll
| reply back with corrections.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| ecognize -> recognize
|
| (Though I'm not sure if the typo was intentional.)
| cpfohl wrote:
| I had assumed it was intentional:
|
| Mch lk n cn rd wtht vwls.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The sentence is perfectly fine, you just missed the "r" in
| "recognize".
| renato_casutt wrote:
| thank you so much...fixed
| toastal wrote:
| So many questions: Why's the page so slow? Why do I need
| JavaScript for a non-interactive page? Why don't I get a noscript
| error?
| tarsinge wrote:
| I can totally see how it could benefit some people but for me I
| don't find it works, I feel like it forces a slow on few letters
| words or group of words that I could have read in one glance.
| Also I tried a bit of speed reading and I feel like I already
| read faster than I can process information and that my eyes are
| not the bottleneck when deep reading.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| There is a cliff in speed reading (at least in my experience)
| where you're reading speed for a particular reading exceeds
| your ability to process and/or enjoy the words you are reading.
|
| Similar to audio books ... some podcasts/audiobooks I can
| listen to at 2.5x or higher and others I need to reduce to 1.25
| or 1.5x. Some readers are already fast enough and I listen a
| 1x; Mary Robinette Kowal for instance.
| progx wrote:
| Why not create a basic free browser plugin for e.g. 100 Words of
| a page and a pro version with full page and more customization
| options?
|
| The rules seems to be simple, so i don't know if somebody uses an
| api for that.
| snjy7 wrote:
| My brain just automatically ignores the paragraph with the bold
| letters. I'm having to force myself to focus on reading it. Does
| anyone else experience the same?
| renato_casutt wrote:
| I am very glad that Bionic Reading is being discussed in HN. I am
| aware that it cannot help everyone. But I also get a lot of
| feedback from people who are helped a lot by this reading mode.
|
| Imagine you have problems with reading. You don't realize what a
| huge hurdle that is until you talk to people who are affected.
|
| Being ashamed in front of society. The problem of learning new
| things. Being called stupid. And these are just a few examples of
| people affected.
|
| Therefore I thank you very much that you discuss the problem
| critically. Best regards from the Alps, Renato
| mkl wrote:
| I spotted a couple of language issues on the webpage. "most
| concise parts of words" doesn't make sense, as "concise" means
| brief or short. Maybe you meant "important"? "very great" isn't
| proper English.
| selfportrait wrote:
| I saw the opacity features but I was curious to see if with
| that feature, the bold text could stay as-is, and the regular
| text could take on lower opacity so that the full word is still
| there but only the bold parts are in full color. The opacity
| demo showed the whole paragraph as taking on an opacity
| reduction. I'm wondering if making the regular letters less
| opaque would disrupt the flow or further help focus on the
| important bits in bold?
| barroomhero wrote:
| I'd love to see an utility on the site that I can paste a
| paragraph of text and run it through to see it in action.
| toss1 wrote:
| Nice work!
|
| This would be an awesome enhancement to Pocket- which already
| extracts web page texts into a lighter format - I'd probably
| read everything through that
| oauea wrote:
| You did such a service to society by patenting this. Bravo.
| thom wrote:
| I normally have to make a conscious effort to speed read so this
| is intriguing. I've had a lot of success with Edge's reader mode
| with verbs and nouns highlighted in different colours.
| thom wrote:
| I guess my only argument against these approaches is that I'd
| like to have a method that works for physical texts as well so
| practising speed reading seems the most impactful thing.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Thank you for your feedback. Yes, this version of Bionic
| Reading is the beginning of the reading mode. Of course there
| are ways to structure the word types as well as the syllables.
|
| Its the BR verion1
| mrpf1ster wrote:
| This is a pretty interesting find, it did help me read faster. I
| think the website would be better served by having the example
| texts be different though.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Did you know that
|
| We humans store learned words and so just a few letters
|
| your brain reads faster
|
| are enough to recognize whole words.
|
| than your eye?
|
| I'm embarrassed how long this took me to understand.
| Proddducts wrote:
| oh wow It is second product I saw today regarding reading the
| first one is https://www.stumbleme.com/ it suggest amazing reads
| everyday.
|
| Nice work.
| crackercrews wrote:
| Please don't do this here. Your profile shows a single
| submission. It is a Show HN for the website you linked above.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Thank you for your feedback. I'm very glad you recognize the
| benefits of Bionic Reading.
|
| Best regards from the Swiss Alps, Renato
| chsreekar wrote:
| Would love a browser extension similar to distiller mode that
| uses this
| talhof8 wrote:
| Not to be mean, but I did not understand anything from the
| landing page about what the product/service does. So confusing...
| atagebu wrote:
| This is really interesting. I wonder how difficult it would be to
| have a set of "training texts" where the reader/user is presented
| with different parameters to observe optimum points for speed vs
| retention. Excited to read the study when it's published.
| mrgill wrote:
| Should've made a browser extension for Chrome/Firefox.
|
| Without that, how can this ever come to the browser?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| hexomancer's script (elsewhere on this page) could be turned
| into a GreaseMonkey/Tampermonkey user script.
| [deleted]
| doctoboggan wrote:
| There is a similar technology that flashes the words in place as
| you read. I remember it making the rounds a few years ago.
|
| https://spritz.com/
| dskrepps wrote:
| There's an open source version that works as a simple
| bookmarklet here: https://github.com/ds300/jetzt
| garblegarble wrote:
| It also looks to be available as a Firefox extension,
| Stutter: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| GB/firefox/addon/stutter/
| [deleted]
| loa_in_ wrote:
| There's also spreeder on Android in similar spirit which I
| found useful to read web content. The downside is I have to
| copy and paste it from the browser
| totetsu wrote:
| There are many good RSVP apps and browser plugins. I find it
| better for news or other things I want to skim read, than
| trying to power through a novel.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| You are right. The advantage of Bionic Reading is that you
| can customize your reading settings.
|
| I think if you want to read a book in a relaxed way, but you
| have dyslexia (10% of people), then Bionic Reading can help
| you.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Yes, you are right. The problem with Spritz is that you lose
| the overview of the text and therefore you can't optimally
| absorb the context of the content. Some users have already
| confirmed this to me. But the technique is cool...
| Crazyontap wrote:
| Btw spritz is an evil company who bullies software developers
| with their ridiculous and vague patents.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9046034
| renato_casutt wrote:
| To my knowledge they do not have a patent ;)
| hackernewds wrote:
| Are you the creator of BR?
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Yes, that's just me, Renato Casutt. From a small town in
| Switzerland. I discovered BR in my studies as a
| typographic designer. And I think it's time to show that
| typography is not just well-designed text pages. There
| are also ways to make reading easier for other people
| with reading difficulties (e.g. dyslexia sufferers).
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| Why do fonts not use this technique?
| brap wrote:
| A better way to make your text readable is to:
|
| 1. make it short
|
| 2. use simple words
|
| 3. use lists
|
| I feel 80% of text is just filler.
| andai wrote:
| I often hear this sentiment in book reviews. "This book could
| have been expressed in the length of an article, but then they
| couldn't have published a book."
|
| I suppose the more common version is "this article could have
| been expressed as a tweet!"
| brap wrote:
| Especially videos, which often take 10min to get to the
| point.
| mspaper wrote:
| I agree.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| This does indeed seem to work for me, but the repeated emphasis
| on the patents and trademarks makes me suspicious. It looks like
| a company who cares much more about patent royalties than about
| their invention - whom I would never be willing to give my money
| to. Having seen the principle, I could write a browser extension
| in an hour. I suppose I'll have to wait 25 years (or whatever the
| French patent expiry length is), though.
|
| If you want to read the patent (in French), it's here:
| https://data.inpi.fr/brevets/FR3052587. I couldn't find the
| German patent (10 2017 112 916.2), but I'm guessing it's the same
| substance.
| nickjj wrote:
| > I suppose I'll have to wait 25 years (or whatever the French
| patent expiry length is), though.
|
| Is that how patents work in general?
|
| I always thought (and could be very wrong here) that if a
| patent exists for something but you've developed an alternative
| something in total isolation without seeing the patent then you
| would have free reign on how to design and develop your thing
| without violating the patent.
| karatinversion wrote:
| The opposite is true, in fact - a patent is a monopoly on the
| patented technology, no matter where alternative
| implementations come from. You might be thinking of "clean
| room" techniques which protect against claims of copyright
| infringement.
| nickjj wrote:
| > You might be thinking of "clean room" techniques which
| protect against claims of copyright infringement.
|
| Ah yes, that's what I was thinking of -- thanks.
| Specifically a scene from an episode of Halt and Catch Fire
| (I won't describe it due to spoilers).
|
| That's a real bummer for patents though and makes me wonder
| how something like Amazon's 1-click checkout was able to be
| patented. I wonder how "save billing details for future
| use" can be considered a novel idea.
| bccdee wrote:
| > Amazon's 1-click checkout
|
| For a long time, software patenting law was famously lax.
| You could basically patent anything software-related if
| you knew the right legalese. The situation has apparently
| gotten better after a 2014 SCOTUS ruling, but in the '90s
| and '00s it was pretty dire.
|
| https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month
| https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608772/the-battle-
| against...
| Dangeranger wrote:
| I believe those scenes were an amalgamation of Tim
| Paterson's clean room implementation of DOS from the CP/M
| manuals [0] and Compaq's IBM compatible BIOS
| implementation[1].
|
| They are a some of my favorites, and are fun to watch.
|
| [0] https://dfarq.homeip.net/did-microsoft-steal-dos-
| from-cpm/
|
| [1] https://dfarq.homeip.net/first-compaq-computer/
| kizer wrote:
| What's the thing where you have to license your patent?
| Like when it's used in a standard or something?
| 7steps2much wrote:
| You might be talking about "Essentially Patents"?
|
| > Standards organizations, therefore, often require
| members disclose and grant licenses to their patents and
| pending patent applications that cover a standard that
| the organization is developing. >
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_patent
|
| Please not that this is less of a "You have to offer
| licenses or else" and more of a "Hey please do that."
| camel_Snake wrote:
| There's an English language family member of this granted
| patent that was filed in the UK. English specification starts
| around page 30:
| https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/96/4d/2b/749f7a4...
| jxy wrote:
| I can't read the pantent. What about some variant? Does this
| text read better or worse?
|
| What about this text? Would anything work better than simple
| plain text?
| mkl wrote:
| Definitely worse. It's the starts of words that are
| important.
| rapnie wrote:
| Yes, I agree. I guess this technology isn't for everyone. This
| is a real bummer. They did not have to patent and trademark
| this method, which in principle is such a basic mechanism. Just
| had to productize their service really well so they'd take the
| lead in monetizing.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| I am alone and I put all my money, time and work into BR.
| Visible is only a small part. But I think everyone decides
| for themselves what is best. But thank you for the critical
| feedback.
| oauea wrote:
| You put all your money, time and work into bolding the
| first few letters of a word?
| rapnie wrote:
| Thank you for responding. Despite my criticism I'd like to
| say that the method is really working for me. So as an
| invention it is great.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| I thank you for your criticism. This is the only way to
| move forward and I take it very seriously. Therefore I
| thank you!
|
| Best regards from the Alps Renato
| osullip wrote:
| I disagree 100%.
|
| This is amazingly innovative.
|
| We have seen letter switching examples and how the brain will
| try to fill in the gaps.
|
| This is superbly unique and justifiably a patent and
| trademark.
|
| The demo works.
|
| The rules may be simple. But as the old boat repairman story
| says, sometimes you need to know where to hit the hammer.
|
| Please, please don't use this for evil.
| kizer wrote:
| Plus without a patent it would be very easy to capitalize
| on this without compensating the guy for all the research
| and tuning his put into it. I think patents are ideal for
| new ideas that are super easy to steal/copy, right? Sure
| Academics working at the bleeding edge should patent for
| example but they're likely to have a little advantage by
| being the expert and actually knowing how to do the thing.
| But in this case the result may look simple but took
| ingenuity and time to produce just the same.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Thank you very much for your answer. No, I will definitely
| use it for good. For sure.
|
| Best regards from the Alps Renato
| bogwog wrote:
| The only way to use a patent "for good" is to prevent
| someone else from patenting it and exploiting it.
|
| If you're serious, then release a copy-left license for
| the patent (but not necessarily your
| implementation/product/sdk)
|
| Otherwise, just add your commercial licensing terms to
| your website already so people aren't misled into
| thinking they'll be able to do anything with this idea
| unless they pay you.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Agreed. I don't think this deserves to be shown to HN
| given that most people here are strong supporters of free
| and open source
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I agree with the criticism and this response! Glad to see
| you engaging in here. Go go go!
| xupybd wrote:
| We were taught "speed reading" in my first year of an electronics
| diploma. This feels very similar. I found speed reading only good
| for searching through text. Comprehension and memory goes out the
| window when I try it. If I want to get information in fast text
| to speech at 4x speed is more effective.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Yes Bionic Reading is not speed reading. Speed reading has to
| be learned and it is demonstrably difficult to verify.
|
| Bionic reading does not have to be learned, it happens
| intuitively. Because we humans read the way we read.
| taubek wrote:
| This reminds me of speed reading course that I took almost 30
| years ago.
| kizer wrote:
| Woah. Much better comprehension reading the first example text.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Thank you so much kizer...I am very pleased
| namelosw wrote:
| Could anyone explain the rationale behind it? It seems that how
| we represent the letters and the words has significant impacts on
| how easily our brains digest them.
|
| Also a bit of tangent, but I wonder, could fellow English native
| speakers generally skim books like less than three to five
| seconds on each page, and roughly get the idea of those pages?
| I'm a native speaker of Chinese and it's pretty easy for me to do
| it in Chinese, but there's no way for me to do the same in
| English despite I've been reading English for years.
| bmn__ wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > this book author did not write his texts in written German, but
| in a form of the Swiss language, which I did not understand with
| reading. So I noticed that I have great difficulties to read the
| text.
|
| This makes me angry. The German Swiss have deprived themselves of
| their own culture by normalising the practice of writing a German
| variety that is not theirs, and that is not spoken. The other
| three Swiss ethnicities wouldn't dream of doing such a nonsense.
|
| It is nigh 100 years past time that someone who cares - following
| the footsteps of Adelung, Karadzic, Manzoni - pushes through with
| https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieth-Schreibung and takes it to
| the schools, so that in future generations people like Renato
| won't have trouble reading their own native language, and the
| pupils of Romandy learn a (secondary) language that is actually
| useful for orally communicating with their fellow countrymen,
| unlike what happens today.
| togs wrote:
| Seems neat, but is there any research to suggest that this works?
| I'm skeptical because I'm given a claim, "This will help you read
| faster", and then asked to test the claim, which primes me to
| _think_ I am reading faster, regardless of whether I actually am.
| carapace wrote:
| This presumes you're scanning lines but if you really want to
| speed read you should scan whole blocks of text as you draw the
| eye down, there should be little to no horizontal movement when
| you're really reading fast.
|
| - - - -
|
| An interesting and effective method of speed reading is Rapid
| Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). These days it's mostly used in
| the context of psychological/perception studies, but it came
| about as a I/O method for military machines IIRC. Anyway, the
| trick is you display text one word at a time, in the same
| location, so the eye doesn't have to move at all. With a little
| practice and some tweaking (i.e. slight extra delay after periods
| and commas, that sort of thing) you can read very very fast. (For
| me I could read faster than my internal mental voice can speak.)
|
| - - - -
|
| There's an interesting effect where you can take some text and,
| for each word longer than ~5 letters, you leave the first and
| last letter in place but scramble all the "interior" letters. The
| resulting text is still legible!
|
| (I'd give an example here but I'm too lazy. Exercise for the
| reader, eh?)
| ratrocket wrote:
| > There's an interesting effect where you can take some text
| and, for each word longer than ~5 letters [...]
|
| I think you're referring to this (dubbed "Typoglycemia"):
|
| > Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't
| mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are [...]
|
| It's sort of true (although there was never any research at
| Cambridge that anyone has been able to unearth), but it's way
| more limited that " _any_ word longer than 5 characters ". This
| is a good explanation of it (arbitrary link found after a
| search):
|
| https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let...
|
| People seem to want it to be universally true, though. It's for
| sure an interesting phenomenon (and meta-phenomenon).
| Loic wrote:
| As a non native English speaker, this does not work.
|
| Maybe because the part of the brain used to
| read/write/listen/speak a non native language is not the same as
| a native language. I really feel that I need to focus more while
| reading the example paragraph with the bionic stuff.
|
| I tried the other examples, but I memorized enough of the text
| starting the 3rd example that I could not really infer anything.
| Putting the same text for all the examples is not really helpful
| in this case.
| cardamomo wrote:
| As a native English speaker, I also felt like I had to work
| harder to read the bionic text.
|
| I am first grade teacher and have taught many children to read.
| Bionic's principles and algorithm do not match what I
| understand about the science of reading. This just holds the
| first part of a word, regardless of what the letters are. I
| would want an algorithm that is smarter than that (and I
| certainly wouldn't use bionic in the classroom, regardless!).
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Hi cardamomo I understand your skepticism and thank you for
| your criticism. What you see so far from Bionic Reading is
| the base. Of course, children should still learn to read.
| Because only when children have acquired a vocabulary, their
| brain has the representation products. Reading is already
| very well researched. I absolutely agree with you on that.
| Unfortunately, people are reading worse and worse. There may
| be many different reasons for this. But I'm sure you agree
| with me that reading is a cultural asset that everyone must
| use. Who reads worse, has thereby no advantage. Doesn't it?
| Reading transports knowledge. That's why I think it's
| important to take a closer look at the way we read. That's
| why I get a lot of feedback from people who have dyslexia and
| can read better again with Bionic Reading.
|
| Thank you for teaching the children and best regards from the
| Alps, Renato
| Nowado wrote:
| Surprisingly pleasant. I haven't speed read in a while, but this
| felt better than highlighting text, or centering word on screen
| (although those work better with audio support, but I guess that
| could be mixed together).
|
| Few questions:
|
| From what I understand BR figures out 'what part of the word is
| unique enough to be a good enough approximation of the word'. Is
| this somewhat context aware or generic (with parameters available
| for developer)?
|
| How focused are you on iOS?
| tluyben2 wrote:
| This is how I speed read for decades (autodidact); I swoop over
| the page once with my eyes and then just jump over it more or
| less like they show here. Allows me to read multiple books per
| day.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Absolutely tluyben2 Great...
| wccrawford wrote:
| I couldn't find anyone else with my experience: No change at all.
| I wasn't faster or slower on either side, as far as I could tell.
| ryan-allen wrote:
| A friend of mine from another country with a different teaching
| style, when I showed him some speed reading apps laughed,
| saying that he was taught not to sub-vocalise words, and he is
| a smart guy. So maybe you have something similar?`
| wccrawford wrote:
| I had heard about that before, and I definitely try not to
| subvocalize now, so maybe that's the difference. I'm mainly
| surprised that so many people recognize it as definitely
| faster or slower, and so few that see no difference.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| Interesting. When reading in paper and after training for speed
| reading, having those fixed points would slow me down.
|
| In computer screen I adjust the text, making it narrower, and can
| read fast. With pdfs and sites I can't do that so I read slower.
|
| In smartphones the screens are already too narrow and this
| technique works!
| debdut wrote:
| What! This blew me. This magic happening before my eyes. Forget
| the negative comments here on HN, the fact that you had such an
| insight, it's awesome.
|
| Going constructive on the HN comments, if someone found
| something, you got a right to protect and earn from it anyway,
| charging for however a simple idea helps it spread and let's you
| do more innovation on it. But that said, maybe a library with
| paid access is a better idea than api which needs to travel
| across 14 seas and 7 oceans!
| debdut wrote:
| This React component library is monetized to heaven!
|
| [1] https://alvarotrigo.com/fullPage/pricing/
| chrismorgan wrote:
| It's also obnoxious and utterly frustrating as an end-user.
| (I know that's not the aspect of it you're remarking on but
| rather the monetisation, but I find their demo just _so_
| painful and the entire idea quite ill-conceived.
| Scrolljacking is _always_ bad. Stop trying to take over the
| page flow and just make it a normal page that I can scroll as
| I desire.)
| xvector wrote:
| I think the idea is great but the greediness on display
| here kind of disgusts me.
|
| Here is something that could legitimately be useful for
| many people, help the consumption of human knowledge when
| open-sourced, but instead it is patented and monetized to
| the maximum extent.
|
| Super distasteful.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I believe we're talking about different things. I'm
| talking about fullPage.js, but I think you're talking
| about Bionic Reading.
| daenz wrote:
| Works for me and my partner. Very impressive, I wish you the
| best. However, I think you're trying to capture something that's
| too big and elusive to be captured. If this improves peoples
| ability to consume information with a relatively trivial change
| (not calling your technology trivial, but relative to other
| infrastructure costs, it is), then there is no way that you won't
| see hundreds of spinoffs by companies and open source engineers,
| even if they are inferior products. And if you try suing them
| all, you will become the enemy in the public eye.
|
| How do you plan to make money at the scale that this system could
| apply at, without alienating the world by forcing text flow
| through your system or pay some kind of royalty?
| phpnode wrote:
| Cool, here's a quick hack to try a similar technique with the
| comments in this thread (copy and paste into dev tools:
| $$('span.commtext').forEach(span => { const frag =
| document.createDocumentFragment();
| span.textContent.split(/\s+/).forEach(word => {
| const len = Math.ceil(word.length * 0.3); const
| leading = document.createElement('strong');
| leading.textContent = word.slice(0, len); const
| trailing = document.createTextNode(word.slice(len) + ' ');
| frag.appendChild(leading);
| frag.appendChild(trailing); });
| span.parentNode.replaceChild(frag, span); })
| hexomancer wrote:
| I made a version which works in all web pages, it is still very
| hacky though: function bionifyPage(){
| function bionifyWord(word) { if (word.length ==
| 1) { return word; }
| var numBold = Math.ceil(word.length * 0.3);
| // return "<div class=\"bionic-highlight\">" + word.slice(0,
| numBold) + "</div>" + + "<div class=\"bionic-rest\">" +
| word.slice(numBold) + "</div>"; return "<b>" +
| word.slice(0, numBold) + "</b>" + "<span>" +
| word.slice(numBold) + "</span>"; }
| function bionifyText(text) { var res = "";
| if (text.length < 10) { return text;
| } for (var word of text.split(" ")) {
| res += bionifyWord(word) + " "; }
| return res; } function
| bionifyNode(node) { if (node.tagName ==
| 'SCRIPT') return; if ((node.childNodes ==
| undefined) || (node.childNodes.length == 0)) {
| if ((node.textContent != undefined) && (node.tagName ==
| undefined)) { var newNode =
| document.createElement('span'); var
| bionifiedText = bionifyText(node.textContent)
| newNode.innerHTML = bionifiedText; if
| (node.textContent.length > 20){
| node.replaceWith(newNode); }
| } } else {
| for (var child of node.childNodes) {
| bionifyNode(child); } }
| } bionifyNode(document.body); }
| phpnode wrote:
| I think yours infringes the patent ;)
| hexomancer wrote:
| Alright, I modified it to be like the original comment.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I have some trouble making it work in Chrome and Firefox
| (Win 10). Your parent's code does work, so maybe you
| introduced a bug when editing the code?
| hexomancer wrote:
| you need to manually run bionifyPage() after executing
| the script.
| w-m wrote:
| Could you make one that reduces the opacity of the second
| half of the word, while keeping the same boldness for the
| complete text, to compare the effect?
| hexomancer wrote:
| I have made a chrome extension that does that:
| https://github.com/ahrm/chrome-fastread
|
| You can customize the css attributes of highlighted text
| and rest of the word using the two input texts.
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It would be interesting to see what demands this places on the
| source material.
|
| There's a fair bit of work in say philosophy where for example
| the concepts being discussed may be things like relationships
| between things, or things themselves, or being, also unavoidably
| something that crops up in the actual discussion, you're
| comparing comparisons or saying that that that thing that is is.
| You kinda usually have to slow down considerably to break these
| things down to have any hope of actually understanding them.
| captainbland wrote:
| I read it and it did feel a little easier/quicker, but it's hard
| to discount it just being 'novelty' factor making it more
| engaging being the cause of that perception. But the real test
| would be a longer text.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Welp. You patented making letters bold.
|
| You literally made this technology inaccessible for decades to
| come now. Thanks for that.
| elloworld1221 wrote:
| I wonder how difficult it would be to turn this into a Calibre
| plug in to convert existing ebooks
| sly010 wrote:
| Not 100% sure it's possible, but maybe you could turn this into a
| font family and license it. It would be a much better way to make
| money than an API that can be replaced with a 3 line function.
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| Interesting. This indeed made me read faster than usual.
| sedivy94 wrote:
| I've been consistently suspicious of speed-reading solutions. I
| have a loud inner voice that insists on annunciating everything
| that is read before comprehension takes place. Speed-reading
| typically outpaces my inner voice.
|
| Like many others, I scan over sentences multiple times. This has
| made me more a apt reader technical writing than creative or
| conversational writing.
|
| Maybe I'm yet another smooth-brain falling for the placebo
| effect, but I truly perceived an increase in reading speed that
| did not outpace my inner voice. Nice!
| red0point wrote:
| The rules implemented are very simple (taken from the patent
| application [1], the exact numbers are configurable).
| If there are <= 3 letters, one letter is bold. If there are
| == 4 letters, two letters are bold. If there are > 4
| letters, 40% of all letters are bold.
|
| There is this claim as the first text on the website:
| We are happy if as many people as possible can use the advantage
| of Bionic Reading. For this reason, Bionic Reading should be able
| to be integrated into existing apps and services. The benefit for
| the reader should be the main focus.
|
| If that is truly correct, why not publish these 3 rules? Why hide
| it behind multiple patent applications and trademarks? Why spend
| all this time and money on patents and an API that probably
| involve sending all text to some servers, just so that these 3
| lines of code can be executed?
|
| [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102017112916A1/en
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sdoering wrote:
| Being a cynical person I would answer your questions with:
|
| Because money.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| I decided to take out a patent a long time ago. Unfortunately I
| had to make bad experiences, which is why I now want to offer
| BR as API.
|
| With the rules it depends on whether it is short, medium or
| long words. But in principle it is simple.
|
| As simple as we humans read. Eye - brain - representation
| products (words)
| noeltock wrote:
| Great product that might get lost because of overthinking the
| business model (say that even as a fellow Swiss). Think the
| giga-opportunity here is for a chrome extension, releasing it
| for free or freemium won't interfere with your patent (and if
| you don't, someone else will, regardless of the legal
| aspects). Either way, congratulations on this innovation,
| it's elegant.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Ich danke Dir vielmals noeltock.
|
| Ja ich hatte bereits zwei Browser Extensions (Chrome,
| Firefox) als Beta-Versionen. Aber die Erkenntnis war, dass
| sehr viele Websites -- da diese ja individuell erstellt
| werden -- keine gute Experience ergab.
|
| Deswegen habe ich mit Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) getestet, wie
| es am besten nutzbar gemacht werden kann. Hab aus Fehlern
| gelernt, aber wir denken dass es viele Entwickler gibt, die
| BR in ihren Leseprodukten anbieten mochten...
|
| Aber vielleicht liegen wir da ja auch falsch. Man muss es
| versuchen und dann weitere Erkenntnis daraus ziehen.
|
| A liaba Gruass us Chur Renato
| xvector wrote:
| The problem is that since you've patented these 3 lines
| of code, I'm not sure many other can legally write a
| browser extension for this functionality. I'd like to use
| this in Safari on iOS, for example, but... I can't.
| toxik wrote:
| Just change the logic ever so slightly, I'm sure it's
| possible to do this in many ways.
| liminvorous wrote:
| Clearly these three rules are a fact about human
| pyschology rather than an invention and should be
| ineligible for patents. I understand that New Zealand law
| for example classifies pure software inovation as
| categorically not being invention. I'm unsure of what
| hoops you'd have to jump through to take advantage of
| this fact to release a browser extension for example, but
| it seems like it should be possible, though code signing
| and stuff might cause problems.
| pc86 wrote:
| Honestly it's just one hoop - are you confident you won't
| be sued, and if you're wrong, are you willing to pay for
| the legal defense?
| andai wrote:
| Translation:
|
| Thank you very much noeltock. Yes, I already had two
| browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) as beta versions.
| But the finding was that a lot of websites - since they
| are created individually - did not give a good
| experience. That's why I tested with Silvio Rizzi
| (Reeder5) how it can best be used. Learned from mistakes,
| but we think there are many developers who want to offer
| BR in their reading products... But maybe we're wrong
| about that. You have to try it and then draw further
| knowledge from it. A dear greeting from Chur Renato
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Why did you reply in Lichtensteinian or whatever this is?
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Unfortunately I had to make bad experiences
|
| That has to be the most unfortunate choice of wording !
|
| More seriously though, does BR work in your native Swiss
| German ?
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Sorry for my bad English traceroute66...
|
| I came across BR during my studies as a typographic
| designer. There was a language problem there.
|
| That's why I realized that reading and listening are
| completely different. You can understand a language by
| listening to it. But reading the same language does not
| mean that you can understand it.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| No problem, but the second half of my question was
| genuine.
|
| I can't imagine this working too well with German words ?
| e.g. how much of Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften,
| Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung,
| Lebensabschnittpartner or
| Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan would you need
| to highlight ?
|
| I don't speak German, but surely with compound words,
| your concept doesn't work that well ?
| andai wrote:
| For languages with compound words it looks like you'd
| need to parse out the sub-words and bold the first few
| letters of each one. That's doable but now you need
| language-specific dictionary files etc.
| insta_anon wrote:
| Slightly off-topic - while I know that there are these
| lists of "crazy long German words" to make fun of each
| one of your examples besides the "Donau.." I actually
| used normally in conversations in the past.
|
| Even just a couple days ago I came across
| "Personalisierungsinfrastrukturkomponente" [0] in a news
| article, so it is not just a rumor that Germans like
| long-ass words :)
|
| [0] Apparently these are the devices used by the
| government to verify passports and / or fingerprints of
| refugees.
| lekevicius wrote:
| I'm quite certain I could fit BR logic in less than 300 bytes
| of JS Regex. There is no need for an API here.
| wussboy wrote:
| Comment favourited
| rsanek wrote:
| You could reduce this to just rounding using the 40% rule +
| minimum of 1 bold letter right?
|
| 1 * .4 = .4, 1 bold letter (minimum)
|
| 2 * .4 = .8, 1 bold letter
|
| 3 * .4 = 1.2, 1 bold letter
|
| 4 * .4 = 1.6, 2 bold letters
|
| etc.
| ranit wrote:
| As GP said, the exact numbers are configurable, therefore
| your simplification may not work. BTW, none of the examples
| (the first text and all the subsequent variants) on the web
| site follows exactly these 3 rules, it must be something
| more.
| elil17 wrote:
| Looking at the example in one of the apps (Reeder 5) doesn't
| work 100% the same as the patent. For example, neumann (a last
| name) is bolded as NEUMANn the first time it appears and
| NEUMann the second time it appears.
| matsemann wrote:
| I wonder how bolding more on uniqueness would work? Instead of
| just first characters.
|
| For instance now THeir and THere will be bolded the same, on a
| quick glance that can be confusing. (Using caps as HN can't do
| bold)
|
| Would it increase pattern recognition in the brain if it
| instead was THeIr and THeRe, or some other variant where the
| bolding highlights the unique parts of a word compared to other
| common words?
|
| Well I wrote the idea here, so don't try patent it, hehe.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Haha...nice The basic problem with reading is that your eye
| needs a fixed point...that's why they should be "blocks".
| This one doesn't have to be at the very beginning though ;)
| But cool comment Hehe
| matsemann wrote:
| True. You made me remember a different concept, where words
| would flash at the same point, but centered around some
| fixed highlighted character per word.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ky8DP55YEO0
|
| Edit: but thank you for sharing your concept here, very
| interesting, and I like the discussions it created.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Thank you matsemann
| moritonal wrote:
| Ironically (given the GP comment) this tech also died
| because of their aggressive attempt to commercialise it.
| kranner wrote:
| I had an iOS speed-reading app at the time and considered
| integrating their API because users requested it. Not
| only would they have required individual users to sign in
| to their API via my app, IIRC their terms allowed them to
| track what each user was reading. Naturally I declined. I
| hope OP's terms of use are more respecting of user
| privacy.
| kache_ wrote:
| A giant hashmap generated by hours and hours of ab testing on
| humans with eye tracking
| cushychicken wrote:
| Because these folks deserve to eat and pay rent for a few years
| upon discovering something so useful.
| bogwog wrote:
| It's disingenuous to say they want as many people as possible
| to use it while at the same time filing a patent application.
|
| That's like Microsoft saying they want as many people as
| possible to use Azure: _no shit_
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| If we expect everyone to innovate and build useful tools
| solely out of the goodness of their heart, then we can expect
| far fewer useful tools & innovations in the future.
| krageon wrote:
| So make that part of the mission statement. There's no need
| to pretend to be a bunch of saints.
| todd8 wrote:
| I don't really see it that way. Yes, the _about_ link leads
| to a page where the goal of improving the way people can
| read is described, but it would be odd to see them say,
| "and we expect to make money from working on this project".
|
| Each of us is motivated by different goals. I am motivated
| to have a comfortable life, and I've worked for different
| companies over time to achieve this. I also find personal
| satisfaction in helping others so I've occasionally make
| charitable contributions of time and money, but I don't
| expect that everyone else is going to make the same choices
| I have. We don't know the motivation that drove the
| inventors of this new reading technology. Maybe it was to
| simply make money for riotous living, but it could be that
| they have a critically sick partner that needs expensive
| surgery. These are personal and private choices that I
| don't feel a need to weigh. Improved reading technology
| sounds like a good thing for not just the inventor, but for
| all of us.
|
| When I buy some peaches from a farmer at a stand by the
| highway, I want the peach more than I want the dollar I
| have in my pocket. The farmer wants the dollar more than
| the peach. After I buy the peach we are both better off. I
| don't need to feel that the farmer is a non-profit farmer.
| I expect the farmer to be happier after the sale, for
| otherwise next year he may not even be there for my benefit
| during peach season. What I do expect, is that the farmer
| doesn't misrepresent his product, that he doesn't steal my
| credit card number, that he holds up his side of the
| bargain; if so, next year, I will be there to buy his
| peaches again.
|
| I've invented a number of important technologies and
| benefited from doing so. Some, when I worked for others,
| ended up being patented. Such is the environment we find
| ourselves in, but for many of my ideas I chose not to
| protect them by patents and let these be adopted by
| standards organizations instead. Personally, I don't think
| patents are a good fit for software, and I would rather see
| better use of copyright protection for software or a
| simpler much shorter patent, say three years for software.
| The open source software movement has been an amazing gift
| to humanity, but so has the deluge of products (and
| peaches) produced for the profit motive.
| boldreader wrote:
| [deleted]
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| > If there are > 4 letters, 40% of all letters are bold.
|
| Very cool :)
|
| I would have thought there is also value in bolding the last-x-
| amount of letters.
|
| I forgot the name of the "concept" but it's been shown that the
| beginning and ending parts of words are the most
| "recognizable". You usually see a sample of that on those
| 'silly-facebook-posts', example:
|
| "I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was
| rdnaieg"
|
| [1] https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/can-you-read
| boldreader wrote:
| ryan-allen wrote:
| It was faster for me, I learned to read in Australia which
| apparently doens't have a very sophisticated reading education,
| sub-vocalisation kept us slow compared to other systems.
| renato_casutt wrote:
| Ryan-allen, I'm so glad to hear that. Best regards from the
| Alps, Renato
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