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.