Reading the Web - Readability
In this screencast, I take a short trip through Readability, a reading tool developed by Arc90 that folks use to strip the text out of a Web page and put into a more “readable” frame. “Readable” might involve bigger text, or more white space, or, in some cases, stripping out the links and moving them to the end of the article ala Carr’s notion about hyperlinks causing distraction.
One thing that worries me about these sorts of tools is how they manipulate the text – or can. If you can move the hyperlinks, then what else can you move? Or substitute? How do these substitutions and/or moves change the text? Are these sorts of tools helpful to readers or do they help us to become editors and perhaps even co-authors of the texts that we encounter online?
