It’s not often that we get to control how information is presented to us and even adjust the format to our personal preferences, so I was unbelievably excited recently to discover a brilliant tool for the web called “Readability.” I have to give a hat tip to David Pogue, who turned me on to this in his NY Times column and who declared: “Readability has changed my life.”
Readability by Arc90 Lab is a “bookmarklet,” and its installation is quite possibly the easiest I’ve ever seen. Simply go to the Readability page, select your few preferences (font, size, margin) and then drag the Readability icon to your bookmarks. Now, any time you find yourself on a web page reading a story and want to eliminate all the distracting advertisements, flashing banners, endless links and other web junk, just click the Readability bookmark and your current page will be transformed into a distraction free page of easily read text. Need to go back to the original page? Just click on the return button at the top left of the page.
Readability works best for longer form articles, but it does work on Mac and PC and with any browser you might be running.
Below is a before and after from a NY Times article…
Let me know what you think of this!
