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A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

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Re: A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

#21

Wonder how that fits with the expansive Patents over the tech: https://bionic-reading.com/patent-trademark-2/

IANAL but it's probably not a licensed use of the patent.

That said, that a patent exists does not mean the patent holds up under scrutiny. Software patents in particular are often not worth the digital paper they were printed on.

THAT said, this doesn't mean patent holders won't litigate or at least request a takedown.

Re: A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

#22
Had to read the source to figure out what this does! It bolds the first few letters of each word to make it easier for the human eye to fixate on those points.

There are also variants where they will turn each line into a colorful gradient to make it easier to know which line you're on and thus move between lines more easily.

I have been thinking of making a "syntax highlighter" browser extension for English text, so words would be colored according to their grammatical function. I'm also wondering of ways to identify keywords (based on how rare the word is?) in text and make them stand out (color, size?), to facilitate finding information in large blocks of text.

Re: A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

#24

Is there any actual research/study on the efficacy of bionic reading? If it improves reading speed / comprehension significantly then it's really a no-brainer.

I did a wholly unscientific test on the example listed on the bionic reading website. I finished reading the normal example in 12 seconds, and the bionic reading example in 11.5, which I'd say is within the margin of error/normal variance. I don't see the advantage of this, but I'd love to see evidence that suggests otherwise.

Re: A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

#26

Is there any actual research/study on the efficacy of bionic reading? If it improves reading speed / comprehension significantly then it's really a no-brainer.

Agreed, this sounds similar to Beeline reader ( https://www.beelinereader.com/ ) which I didn't find helped my reading speed (per their test as well) despite lots of studies cited.

I found that beeline did help me, to the point that I briefly paid for it. I stopped when I realized it was reporting back every site I visited to the developer’s Google Analytics.

Re: A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

#27
I saw the stories about Bionic Reading a few days ago and ended up going down the rabbit hole for a bit. What interested me was that it wasn't the weight of the letters that helped me read quicker but the shorter lines.

The examples with and without Bionic Reading formatting were just as easy for me to read but where it fell apart was when I read something with more words per line. Put 12+ words on a line and the Bionic Reading formatting didn't help.

Having an average of 5 words per line is so much easier for me to read it kinda blows my mind.

My (totally pulled out of my ass) guess as to why this is the case (for me anyway) is that less horizontal eye movement reduces cognitive load and allows for easier processing of what the brain is seeing.

Has anyone else found this?

Re: A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

#28

If you want to try it out on a PDF, I have implemented this in sioyek PDF reader: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek You need to enable experimental features in `prefs_user.config` by adding `enable_experimental_features 1` and then enable this mode using `toggle_fastread` command within sioyek. I also experimented with more sophisticated algorithms, you can read about the experiment here: https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/u…

(Developer of the Github repository in the post here)

Is it possible for me to easily integrate with sioyek to provide PDF converting ability directly within the Chrome Extension? This would be useful for the following reasons: - For the times when you click on a link and it opens the PDF in Chrome - Many people I know use Chrome as their main "PDF Viewer" app.

I believe this will be a great way for both our OSS projects to collaborate.

Perhaps in the future we can work on the language model as well. Very cool reasearch btw!

Re: A Chrome extension for bionic reading on any website

#30

Also https://github.com/ahrm/chrome-fastread (Firefox vers: https://github.com/akay/firefox-fastread ). Note that neither it or the submitted link use the Bionic Reading API and are instead utilizing their own algorithms for similar results.

(Developer of the Github repository in the post here)

Firefox support will be ready in under 12 hours :)

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