Do any of your students have trouble focusing as they read a webpage; does the advertising distract them? Do you have students with vision challenges that make it difficult for them to read a “regular” webpage? The Readability tool created by Arc90 Lab is an excellent and free application you can add to a browser. In fact, I am so impressed with this free tool I would suggest that it become part of the computer image used on all school computers. Readability works with most major modern browsers and has been tested on many news sites and blogs. It isn’t 100% effective but works surprisingly well and serves as an excellent text optimizer for many of the cluttered webpages that many students find distracting. I tried this application in both Chrome and Foxfire with good results. Below, I have posted screenshots of a blog entry before I used the Readability Tool and after.

BEFORE….

AFTER….

Watch the following video to learn more about this terrific little tool that I feel would have great application as an assistive technology application….then, try it out as you browse through a number of different webpages.

Reading articles is getting harder and harder on the Web. Readability is an easy-to-use bookmarklet that quickly removes all the clutter around what you’re trying to read.

To install it

1. visit: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability
2. Customize your reading view.
3. Add the bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar.

Whenever you’re on a page worth reading, simply click on the Readability link.