Surely someone can do thus in CSS?
Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
171–180 of 281 posts
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#172I 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…
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.
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#173I feel like I am "consuming" the words quickly, but there is no room for my brain to think.
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#174So 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?
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because these folks deserve to eat and pay rent for a few years upon discovering something so useful.
So make that part of the mission statement. There's no need to pretend to be a bunch of saints.
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.
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#176Interesting! 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.
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#177Seems 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.
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#178The rules implemented are very simple (taken from the patent application [1], the exact numbers are configurable). 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 t…
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Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#179How long will it take for your brain to start considering this text representation as regular text block?
Re: Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
To my knowledge they do not have a patent ;)
Are you the creator of BR?
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).