What you need to know
- Bionic Reading is a new way of consuming content that is taking the internet by storm.
- It highlights small portions of words to make them easier to read.
- The tool is now available as a Chrome extension right in your web browser!
A viral 'Bionic Reading' tool that is taking the internet by storm is now available as a Chrome Extension for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
Bionic Reading announced the Chrome rollout on Twitter, and the extension is now available to download on Chrome. Of course, that means you can also use it on Microsoft Edge, which are both good browser options on macOS Monterey and Apple's best MacBooks and desktop computers.
Bionic Reading is a tool that highlights small portions of words to make them easier to read so that your brain can digest sentences more easily. These "fixations" can be tweaked so you can choose how much of a word shows up in bold, and the contrast levels between this and the rest of the text.
From our original story last week:
Bionic Reading was created by Swiss developer Renato Casutt. The tool is described as "a new method facilitating the reading process by guiding the eyes through text with artificial fixation points." In short, this tool makes different parts of words stand out, only highlighting the initial letters and letting your brain do the rest.
The Chrome extension, once downloaded, can be used to convert any website into a Bionic Reading page for your consumption. Clicking the BR button in your browser will pull up a special page similar to the Reader view in most browsers, including settings at the top to adjust all of the aforementioned parameters, font sizes, and more.
Early testing indicates this is a work in progress, the tool seems to work well on iMore, for instance, but not BBC News. You can check it out here.
