Speed Reader

Why I made this

I read a lot on screens and wanted a speed reader that wasn't buried in ads, didn't make me sign up, and didn't send my reading to somebody else's server. So I built one. It's the same idea Spritz made famous: one word at a time, a steady focus point, and the speed turned up gradually.

How it works

Your eyes normally hop along a line several times a second, and every hop costs time. Here the words come to your eyes instead. Each one is lined up on its focus letter, the orange one, roughly where your eye naturally lands in a word. Commas get a short pause, full stops a longer one and paragraph breaks longer still, and long words and numbers get a little extra time. The speed starts at about half your top speed and climbs to it over the ramp-up time you choose. After a pause it climbs again, twice as fast. You can also flash two or three words at a time.

• Keys: the space bar plays and pauses, the left and right arrows move a sentence, the up and down arrows change the speed, and R starts over. On a phone, tap the screen.
• It remembers your settings, and where you stopped in a text, on your device only.

Fonts

Lexend was designed to make reading easier and is the font most often suggested for ADHD. Atkinson Hyperlegible was made by the Braille Institute so every letter is easy to tell apart. OpenDyslexic has weighted letter bottoms that some readers with dyslexia find steadier. Or keep this site's own font. No font has been proven to help everyone, so try them and keep whichever feels easiest.

A word of honesty

Reading this way is great for articles, email and skimming. At very high speeds understanding drops, mostly because you can't glance back the way you can on a page, which is exactly why pausing shows you the paragraph. Somewhere between 300 and 450 words a minute is a comfortable place to start. Most people read about 240.

Files and links

You can open PDFs, EPUB ebooks, Word (.docx) files, and plain text or HTML files. Files are read inside your browser and never uploaded. Scanned PDFs (pictures of pages) and copy-protected ebooks can't be read. Links work for most articles, blogs and Wikipedia. Some sites, including the big paywalled newspapers, block automatic reading. For those, copy the article and paste it in.

Is my text private?

Yes. Here is exactly how, for anyone who would rather check than trust.

• Pasted text and files never leave your device. They are read by scripts that run inside your browser, and you can read those scripts yourself, starting at erikmaier.com/static/tools/speed-reader/tool.js.
• A link is the one thing that is sent anywhere, and only to this site. Your browser sends the link to this site's own link reader, which fetches that page and hands it back, and your browser keeps only the article's words. Nothing is saved, and the link travels inside the request rather than in its address, so this site never writes it to a log. Cloudflare, which runs the site, sees the request the way it sees every visit.
• The page ships with a Content-Security-Policy header: a rule the browser enforces that this page may only run its own scripts, and those scripts may only talk to erikmaier.com itself.
• There are no ads, no trackers and no analytics script on this page. It loads its own files, two fonts from Google Fonts for the site's design, and its reading font (Lexend to start, or the one you pick) from this site. The words you read are only ever shown in fonts from this site or from your own device, so your text never makes the page ask Google for anything.
• The page remembers your settings, where you stopped in each text, and the total time it has saved you, in your browser's local storage. It never keeps the text itself. It recognises a text you come back to by a short fingerprint of it. Text you send over from the Text Cleaner passes through your browser's session storage and is deleted the moment it arrives here.
• To check for yourself: open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and paste something. Nothing new appears. Open a file or read a link and the only new requests go to erikmaier.com itself: the reader's own helper scripts the first time, extra letters for the reading font if your text needs them, and for a link, one request to /api/read.

Is speed reading real?

You really can read faster this way, especially easy material. It's also true that understanding drops when you push the speed too far. Treat the top speed as a dial, not a goal.

Why is one letter orange?

That's the focus letter. Every word is lined up so that letter sits in the same spot, and your eyes can stay still.

Does it work on my phone?

Yes. Tap the screen to pause, and your screen stays awake while you read.

Where did my place go?

The reader keeps your place for the last 20 texts you read, on this device. Paste or open the same text again and it picks up where you stopped.