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It’s amazing that as the Internet has evolved we’ve done precious little to improve the readability of various sites.

Readability changes that.

The Internet is getting worse and worse for reading

Instead of it becoming easier and easier to read websites it’s becoming tougher and tougher -

1. There are more and more ads – including advertisements hiding in content and targeted ads.  
2. Hardly any websites allow you easy options for changing the font size or type.  
3. Some websites even lock out the browser’s font size settings.
4. The text is competing with other design elements.

Now, we have a big step forward.

Readability is Making Reading Cool Again

Readability is an absolutely great tool for reading sites and blogs.

Here’s what they have to say -

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

What does Readability let you do?

Readability lets you strip away everything except the text and put the text into a style, font size, and column width that suits you.

At the Readability site you choose -

1. One of 5 different styles included an inverted colors style.  
2. One of 5 font sizes.  
3. The width of the columns.

Then you save the specified link as a bookmark.

On any page or site or blog press the bookmark to convert the site to your very own Readability enhanced version.

You can also easily print and email the text only version. The difference really is spectacular.

How do you set up Readability?

Here are the steps for Internet Explorer 8 -

1. Go to the Readability Page.  
2. Choose a style from newspaper, novel, ebook, inverse, and athelas. Remember to scroll down and see how the example text looks with your chosen style.
3. Choose a size from extra small, small, medium, large, and extra large. Again remember to scroll down and make sure you like the setting. 
4. Choose the margins – you have extra narrow, narrow, medium, wide, and extra wide.  
5. Right click on the Readability button/badge on the right side of the page and in the options choose ‘Add to Favorites’.
6. You’ll get a warning that you’re adding a favorite that might not be safe. It’ll ask you - Do you still want to continue? Click Yes.
7. The dialog will have the name Readability. Leave that and look at the option below which says ‘Create In’. Click that and select the Favorites Bar directory within Favorites.  
8. This will create a new Favorite in the Favorites Bar of your browser. That means it’ll show up right at the top near where the address bar and search box are (the browser’s search bar). You might have to adjust it so that it’s showing.

To use it – At any page just click on the Readability Button in the Favorites Bar (or you can click on favorites and then go down to Favorites Bar and then the Readability link). 

The site/blog/page will be instantly converted into text only with the style, size, and margin settings you chose.

Hopefully Readability proves useful to you.

Filed under: extensions Tagged: | readability, reading