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.