Hmm, this doesn’t work for me, for some reason. I end up having to pause at the beginning of each word, like a child trying to sound out words while reading. It’s not matching the flow and I feel like something is constantly off…
It helps me read faster, but IDK what effect it has on comprehension in a longer text. If I struggled to read I might be tempted to try it, but thankfully that’s not one of my many issues.
I personally read that passage faster than normal (2x-ish), but yeah, zero comprehension afterwards. If my brain is just filling in the blanks for the back half of every word I’m not actually “reading”, I’m solving a puzzle and then on to something else.
Book’s Story e-reader supports this by the way:
Plug in your phone, you’re at 1%’!
If only it was bold :(
Wow, thanks I was looking for a replacement to ReadEra, I didn’t find this with F-Droid’s search
Same! Awesome.
I kinda like ReadEra (premium)…
I use OpenDyslexic font, and let the text-to-speech help to keep me tracking.
You already read like this. After the first few weeks of you learning to read as a child you probably didn’t read each word letter-by-letter already
Ineded
I’m skeptical about how much the bolding makes people read faster vs placebo of just telling people they should be reading faster. Also as other people stated, comprehension is what counts.
I’ve found with this type of text that if I try to read it normally, I struggle to process the change between the start and end of each word, and read much more slowly. If I try to read quickly though, it flows, as if I’m skimming the words but still understanding them properly.
It’s a very strange feeling :)
Yeah I had a Firefox plugin earlier that turned all text to bionic, and I loved and hated it at the same time
Especially since it feels like you’re reading in 1fps. It feels like stuttering
It’s a loosening of control, I think. Let the wheel turn on its own, you’re still there to steer as needed, but let the inertia do the work. 🤓
what plugin?
I think it was bionic reader.
I don’t want to link to the plugin, since I don’t really know if it’s safe to use so evaluate yourself
Oddly enough, I find myself processing text with a regular font in both ways from time to time. Sometimes it flows like I’m reading half of the words but still absorbing every bit. Other times I notice the end of a paragraph and can’t tell you what I just read.
Old Tony, is this Nice! I read like this like im a normal Person lol.
This picture is yelling half of every word at me
Yeah, I could read it faster but it also feels like it’s messing with my eyes. I think anything of real length in this style would give me a headache.
How do I get this on a kindle?
Doesn’t this just work for everyone?
I think that was debunked once but i am lazy to find the related survey / study.
It seems disproven, or perhaps only useful to some subset of people they haven’t pinpointed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824001811
Honestly though if it helps someone they should ride that placebo as far as it takes them!
I read the study @[email protected] linked and the following statements can be made:
for 32 university students with normal vision and without dyslexia who have not encountered bionic reading before
- There was no statistical relevant difference between bionic and normal texts regarding reading speed and comprehension
- There was no statistical relevant difference between faster and slower readers
- There was no statistical relevant difference when given time to adapt to bionic reading
but
- in bayesian analysis there was no strong evidence for either the null- or the alternative hypothesis (meaning an effect cannot be ruled out) even tho the sample size should have been enough to do just that, meaning it could still have an effect, but it would also mean that if it did, it wouldn’t be something to recommend to someone out of the blue because the relevance for singular people is negligible
- the study did not test people with dyslexia, ADHD or vision impairment, so for those groups no statement can be made.
There were no studies following up on these results, so if someone wants to go for it, it’s free real estate!
Opposite effect for me. I read that much slower than my normal speed
Works for me, but triggers an uncanny-valley/discomfort effect whict Sprint Reader doesn’t.
I hate it. Made me read twice as fast and use four times as much brainpower to comprehend it.
The reason it works is because it makes it harder for the brain.
Same, I was hoping to burn 20 seconds of my life and instead it took only 10
I read pretty fast but it takes a lot of mental energy to pay attention to every word. I could read that very fast and it cost me a very low amount of mental energy.
I love this in principle but I can’t use it myself. I‘m a very fast reader by default, basically already doing what the highlighting tries to make you do, without it needing to be there. The highlighting disrupts that for me. I end up stopping at every word and partially jumping back and forth. I do show this to people on occasion that aren’t as lucky as me with their reading speed and most said it helped them. Not all though.
it slowed my reading in the same way.
Felt wierd realy, like I couldn’t read ahead while my inner voice was “saying” it.
For me, it completely messed up my whole-word and multi-word reading by shape. Like, I don’t read by syllable because I’m not pronouncing the words, I’m just reading the meaning of the whole word directly from the shape of the whole word (or several words), if that makes sense?
Like, when I’m reading, my inner monologue is only “saying” a handful of key words in each sentence, as it fluidity skips over “mentally pronouncing” all the filler/context words.
This completely breaks that. It splits each word into two chunks, neither of which is the word, so I need to show down to “mentally say” both chunks of each word to read them. Like, it’s still fast, I guess, but I’d estimate it slows me down by ⅓-½ish and disrupts my reading comprehension significantly.
I assume that if I read like that for a few hours, I’d likely get used to it, but why bother?
On the other hand, I think that could be a great reading tool, I imagine especially for people with dyslexia, but probably most fluent but slow readers.
I’ve sort of always read that way, inner voice and all. When I learned that really fast readers figure out how to ignore that, or do it naturally, my mind was blown.
Can you expand on that? I have never been a fast reader and speed reading takes the pleasure out of it for me. So, mainly story books, I read at the same pace as a speaker might say them outloud. As if my minds voice is reading them allowed in a chair to the child me setting quietly on the ground. Speed reading feels like watching a show in fast-forward. Great for boring parts but not enjoyable to me.
How does your inner voice feel as you read?
This is the most accurate description I’ve ever seen of how I read
This “tech” has been out for a while but I don’t know that we can easily get it on our phones and computers for general reading :(.
Anyone know?
There’s a bionic reader extension for Firefox that works on mobile, but obvs that only works on webpages
Most such phone apps should be web pages, and the good ones usually have a web-page version.
Librera on fdroid also has this feature (but not referred to as “bionic”)
Settings > Advanced Settings > Highlighting Initial Letters
I don’t know specifically of any piece of tech that does this, but it would be very very easy to code as a plugin for a book reader app or something like that. It’d be more difficult to do well in more complicated text or mixed media, like spreadsheets, PDFs, or browser pages, since you probably don’t want every piece of text on the page to have the effect.
