To be fair, when I open that link, I get light gray text on a dark brown-or-yellow-greyish background which isn’t that easily readable for me - at least contrast wise.

Yeah I had a Firefox plugin earlier that turned all text to bionic, and I loved and hated it at the same time

Especially since it feels like you’re reading in 1fps. It feels like stuttering

Oddly enough, I find myself processing text with a regular font in both ways from time to time. Sometimes it flows like I’m reading half of the words but still absorbing every bit. Other times I notice the end of a paragraph and can’t tell you what I just read.

Yeah, I could read it faster but it also feels like it’s messing with my eyes. I think anything of real length in this style would give me a headache.

It seems disproven, or perhaps only useful to some subset of people they haven’t pinpointed.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824001811

Honestly though if it helps someone they should ride that placebo as far as it takes them!

I read the study @[email protected] linked and the following statements can be made:

for 32 university students with normal vision and without dyslexia who have not encountered bionic reading before

• There was no statistical relevant difference between bionic and normal texts regarding reading speed and comprehension
• There was no statistical relevant difference between faster and slower readers
• There was no statistical relevant difference when given time to adapt to bionic reading

but

• in bayesian analysis there was no strong evidence for either the null- or the alternative hypothesis (meaning an effect cannot be ruled out) even tho the sample size should have been enough to do just that, meaning it could still have an effect, but it would also mean that if it did, it wouldn’t be something to recommend to someone out of the blue because the relevance for singular people is negligible
• the study did not test people with dyslexia, ADHD or vision impairment, so for those groups no statement can be made.

There were no studies following up on these results, so if someone wants to go for it, it’s free real estate!

Works for me, but triggers an uncanny-valley/discomfort effect whict Sprint Reader doesn’t.

I personally read that passage faster than normal (2x-ish), but yeah, zero comprehension afterwards. If my brain is just filling in the blanks for the back half of every word I’m not actually “reading”, I’m solving a puzzle and then on to something else.

There’s a bionic reader extension for Firefox that works on mobile, but obvs that only works on webpages

I don’t know specifically of any piece of tech that does this, but it would be very very easy to code as a plugin for a book reader app or something like that. It’d be more difficult to do well in more complicated text or mixed media, like spreadsheets, PDFs, or browser pages, since you probably don’t want every piece of text on the page to have the effect.

The reason it works is because it makes it harder for the brain.

Same, I was hoping to burn 20 seconds of my life and instead it took only 10

I read pretty fast but it takes a lot of mental energy to pay attention to every word. I could read that very fast and it cost me a very low amount of mental energy.

Spreeder! I love it!

So that you mean that it took a few moments to adjust? Almost like you weren’t going to immediately be able to jump onto the skill instantly and that you needed some more time? Perhaps immediately coming to the conclusion that it is terrible and not worth the time after only a brief experience with the usage of such a thing isn’t the best thing to do. Then again, perhaps calling it crap based off of your own personal experiences when other people in this thread are saying otherwise is a bit narrow minded? Expand your horizons. Let people be people and phrase your opinions as them. Not everything is going to be universal. Live long and prosper, my friend. Have a good day.