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Bi(y)onic reading: Reading supercharged


Not long ago, I discovered a new way of displaying an article that makes reading it much more faster and easier to comprehend. This is called Bionic Reading, but I don’t know if the name comes from the name of an application or the app received the name from the technique.

The trick is to add emphasis to the first part of a word. It doesn’t need to be exactly half of a word, but something like apply a bold style will do. This will cause your eyes to read part of a word and glide from word to word more quickly.

Recently, I added this functionality on the blog. You can toggle it in the settings tab panel that you can find at the bottom left corner of the screen when you’re reading this blog. This setting will be automatically saved on your browser.

It works on both desktop and mobile, but it needs JavaScript to work. If you have JavaScript disabled in your browser, the settings panel will not be shown.

If it still doesn’t work, it may be because you haven’t updated your web browser, or you’re using Internet Explorer. Other quirkier browsers that have limited or no JS functionality like Lynx will obviously not work as well.

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When having this enabled, I noticed I was able to read through an article seen for the first time in a long time in about double the speed compared to my normal reading speed. Effects on people vary quite a lot, and I must admit that while it’s an amazing accessibility feature…

It’s not a solution for everyone

There are several factors that may influence on how it affects to people.

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