Ever since its release in March of last year, Readability has continued to dramatically climb in popularity. The sheer volume of positive sentiment (some more emphatic than others) continues to blow us way. Beyond the "wow, this makes reading so much easier" comments is a whole slew of emails from the elderly, people with vision or cognitive difficulties and users that rely on screen readers. It’s incredibly gratifying to see Readability make a difference for so many people.
Today, we’re excited to announce an important update: Readability 1.5. Some of the changes are more subtle than others. We’ve been listening to your feedback and we’re working to improve Readability for everyone.
So, what’s new in 1.5?
99% Error Free!
We’ve spent a bunch of time making Readability’s parsing capability more robust and accurate. Whereas Readability would trip up on 10-15% of sites in the past, we’re excited to announce that our latest batch of testing shows nearly a 99% success rate on articles with this new version. We actually had a "Make Readability Better" contest within Arc90 and our own Chris Dary came away with the prize (more on that in a future blog post).
More Configuration Options
Starting today, you’ll find additional sizing and margin options for Readability. A lot of people out there asked for light-on-dark text and so we’ve answered that call as well. We’ve also included two brand new styles that feature Typekit fonts (see the next feature).
Typekit Integration
At Arc90, we’ve got a relatively unhealthy obsession with beautiful typography. Part of our
goal with Readability was to not only make it easier to read on the Web but to bring along some quality type to further enhance the experience. A couple of months ago, we reached out to the fine folks at Typekit to see if we can work together.
With today’s release, we’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Typekit to introduce two new styles featuring Typekit fonts.
Our new Inverse style features Betatype’s wonderfully readable Apertura. In addition, we’ve created a fifth style called Athelas which features – well – Athelas, an elegant font by Typetogether. Both fonts are available through Typekit.
Right-to-Left Support
For some of our foreign language readers, Readability would force text that should flow right-to-left justified (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew) to flow left-to-right. With this release, we keep intact the proper flow of text.
Other Little Tweaks
There are a host of tweaks and fixes we’ve made to Readability that are bundled with this release. Also, we’ve created new installation videos that are distinct for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, Safari and Chrome users.
If you’re happy with your current settings in Readability, you don’t need to do a thing to tap the newly improved parsing engine. If you’d like to play with the newly available settings, you’ll need to delete your bookmarklet and reinstall it from the Readability installation page.
We hope you enjoy (and keep enjoying) Readability. We’ve got some very (very!) exciting things in store for the future. You can stay up to date on Readability and all the other goings-on at Arc90 by visiting the Arc90 blog or following us on Twitter.
Harold said:
Deleted older version first; installed v 1.5 by dragging onto Fav. bar in FF after setting prefs. Always reverts to newspaper, wide margins when clicked. Does not appear to change to new settings. Advice? Love the program.
Rafa said:
Can’t acces the Readability installation page ( http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/es/ )
It remains reloading itself once and again. This happens not only in the spanish version page, but also in the main english one.
I love Readability, and reccomended it in my blog.
Ze said:
This is great, however I can not figure out how to toggle it off. Is this not an option? I assumed that if I hit my readability bookmarklet again, it would toggle it off.
Chris Dary said:
Ze, you can just refresh the page to get the original content back. There’s also a reload icon in the top left corner for convenience.
Evgeny Goldin said:
Hi, Is Chrome extension (http://goo.gl/TvuN) using this update?
Bob Monsour said:
I just discovered Readability and I have two loud words for you:
T H A N K Y O U ! ! ! ! !
G said:
Love Readability.
Unfortunately, Hebrew is still aligned to wrongfully to the left.
Tried it on three different news sites.
jj said:
I’m trying to see the page of Readability but you’re stupidly thinking that you can automatically translate the content of the page into Spanish. It reads like crap and I want it in English but I cannot disable the automatic translation.
srid said:
I like Apertura. Does the new font has to be installed on my computer? It seems that Readability automatically downloads the font?
Hayley said:
I love Readability. I don’t suppose anyone has turned it into a WordPress theme yet have they?
PV said:
I love Readability, but it does not work at Newsweek.com
Heiner said:
I love Readability.
So much I’d like to include the Readability-button below every article in my new blog.
Is that okay, or do I get myself into a legal mess with that?
Bill said:
Yup, I get same behavior as Harold — always wide format newspaper regardless of settings..
Technikhil said:
Love the tool – it’s awesome :-) I have blogged about it here . Please go through and let me know if I have missed anything. Thought about embedding your video but was not sure if it would be OK with you guys – please leave a comment letting me know if it’s cool t embed your instructional video.
Crazyfinger said:
Readability is the single most motivating reason for me to come back to web to read longer articles (such as from New Yorker or Times) with the attention they deserve. You guys simply rock…!
Crazyfinger
JDisk said:
Hi,
your new release doesn’t work with the Firefox NoScript extension unless one allows scripts from the original site. In the old version, that problem wasn’t there (or, according to google, it was solved some time ago).
Any chance that you can make both work together?
Pamela G said:
I have recently found Readability and LOVE it! I have also passed the word along to friends, and one had a good idea, if it’s possible. Could you make a button that attaches to the browser toolbar? Or maybe it would need to be a mini-toolbar that you can add to your browser for the button access. Thanks for developing a great product that makes cluttered sites – Readable!!
W Mammoth said:
Have you ever played with the Font Size button on the WSJ? THAT is how Readability should work.
Take a look. Think about it.
Michael Zehrer said:
Is the Google Code project still up to date? http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/
Jonathan Jordan said:
Love it! Any chance of getting right-click menu access, since the bookmarklet is not viewable in full-screen mode?
drhouse said:
This is a demo to show the synergistic combinations of text, motion and sound (when available) in providing a more engaging experience for the reader:
http://narrator.hs.vc
uses:
readability – http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
autoscroll – http://tim.theenchanter.com/
thoreau said:
I would like the option to also strip photos from the page.
George said:
I’ve read about “Readability” in some blog and decided to try it since it looked like a great idea and it proved nothing less than that!
As usually, i downloaded the extension from Add-ons Mozilla Org, tried it, and upon realizing how awesome it is, I decided to localize it for my language and head over to BabelZilla.
During testing though I realized that your source code is released under the Apache license while on AMO the extension is published as GPL.
So, I’d like to ask, is it your team that has submitted the extension to AMO and BabelZilla or just some random guy (can’t find his name in arc90’s board) trying to benefit from your work?
IIsi 50MHz said:
I’ve been using the Readability Redux extension for Google Chrome, which adds a button to the browser toolbar and can be reconfigured without the need to create a new bookmarklet.
I’ve created a patch that adds the ability to work on user-selected text instead of the whole page. You just select the text you want, and click the button. This also lets Readability work on some sites that it normally rejects or fails to parse. One site that where this patch helps is:
http://www.wcpo.com/news/local/story/Public-Library-Branches-Offer-Free-Homework-Help/WXoieLhKZUCRj5LNA4X-Gw.cspx
…where Readability pulls the wrong text instead of the article. The patch also works on forum sites and blog responses.
All my changes are in the “readability.js” file, so perhaps they could be integrated into the main distribution? Simply add the following between lines 61 and 62:
[code]
/* Allow the user to select text for use to work on */
var selection = window.getSelection();
if(selection != "") {
document.body.style.backgroundImage = "none";
//~ document.body.innerHTML = selection;
var range = selection.getRangeAt(0);
if (range) {
var div = document.createElement('div');
div.appendChild(range.cloneContents());
document.body.innerHTML = div.innerHTML;
}
}
[/code]
My patch, however, doesn’t work on very short selections (because Readability assumes it failed when the result is very short).
P.S. Contrary to what “throreau” said, I find that Readability too often strips out relevant photos. :-)
PJ said:
I love the product and think it is a great idea. I would like to see it provide text to speech and control the cursor via the keyboard. We have millions of kids today with reading disabilities and this would really help them.
For a new product to recommend along these lines, can you give me an application like this for my TV so I can watch a show without losing 19.5% of the screen to ticket tape and flying bells and whistles?
Gen Kanai said:
Love Readability but wish to submit a bug. On the NY Times’ site, when reading an article with links, the linked text is omitted from the Readability version (on Firefox, Mac OS.)
alangenh said:
Feature request! I’d love to have a “Generate ePub” button. You’ve already done so much of the work to clean up text, but reading on small devices in browsers is onerous, without the pagination of an official reader. Have you had thoughts along these lines?