Readability

It completely transforms your web experience: no more ads, no more searching for the text among pop-ups.

Most of us don’t (or, at least, prefer not to) spend too much time reading chunks of text off a computer screen. But many of us do navigate the web and source information from it. If you happen to be one of us, this innovative piece of virtual estate could interest you.

It is a ‘bookmarklet’ called Readability that, with a mere point-and-click, promises to turn your web page into one that displays only the text, photos and your relevant links. No annoying ads, flash animations, banners or promos to take away from the reading ex­perience. How cool is that? Let’s see.

Before cleaning your commercial-ridden web pages, Readability also lets you set your font, font size and the background of the page. Then, it proceeds to transform your web page into something that looks like a printed book page or an ebook. Neat.

Why, some may ask, the need for this ex­tra set of clicks before settling down for a comfortable read on the web? Because, gen­erally speaking, reading a web page is not much fun, what with the profusion of bells and whistles going off all around your web page. Therefore something like Readability, web readers will say, is a most welcome de­velopment. What’s more, like the best things in life, it’s free. Once you’ve used it for some time, you will notice that it will, sometimes, parse the information on your web page er­roneously. It’s not a big deal. Just reload the original and click on the bookmarklet again.

Readability is much more than just an ad blocker. What it allows you to do is custom­ise your web experience and turn any web page into something like a blog page, your blog page. Brought to you by arc90.com it, proponents say it addresses many unpleas­ant trends in web layout these days, such as: fonts getting too small, light text on dark backgrounds, quirky font choices, layouts getting cluttered and complex, overlapping with graphics and ads interrupting the flow of the prose.

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