via Slashdot:
A company called Walker Reading Technologies has invented a new way to format text that improves readability and comprehension dubbed, Live Ink. The example from the article is really something. It’s so simple, yet I was able to read and comprehend the Live Ink text much faster than the traditional paragraph text! The difference was definitely startling to me.
Admittedly, I am a slow reader. I don’t know why, but I often find myself reading at an oratory pace which seems to help my comprehension. All to often though, sifting through particularly verbose prose, while appreciated and admired, I have to double over once… sometimes twice… in order to be sure I understand what is being said. I always thought it was because my brain processes audio information better than visual, but it never made entire sense because I’ve always been a fairly capable visual artist.
Until now, I never understood why most people could read much faster than I.
Hopefully they will release their findings to the greater public and someone can adapt a way to parse online text into this new format. I would certainly format the text on this blog to use Live Ink if it were possible. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that they don’t exploit a patent on the technology and keep the Internet at large from reaping the benefits.