Adding ‘Readability’ to websites

Visual clutter is everywhere (primarily in the guise of advertising) and life online is full of blinking, winking ads that do everything short of physically grabbing you by the scruff of your neck and prying your eyes open.

That’s why I installed AdBlock Plus ages ago. It’s also one reason why I’ve kept ads off the Absurd Intellectual site.

How content providers will make money if everyone blocks their ads is a philosophical discussion for a different day. But in the meantime, I’d like to talk about a new tool for eliminating distraction online.

It’s called Readability, by technology and design firm Arc90. I read about it in a column by New York Times tech reporter David Pogue. As he notes, it’s a “bookmarklet” that you drag to the bookmarks bar in your browser. When you click on it, it strips away all the excess gunk on the website, replacing it with something nicely formatted, and easy to read.

The best way to see what I mean is to, well, see it:

BEFORE:

See how much other stuff there is, surrounding the core column?

AFTER:

Ahh, much less distracting. (Click on the pictures above to see them full-size, if you care.)

The Readability site lets you, a little bit, customize the look of the output page. It’s pretty slick.

Now, some caveats: Readability doesn’t work on every website. It tries to figure out what the “important” text is, but it sometimes misguesses. It works best on a single story, for example, and not on a busy homepage like CNN.com or something. It doesn’t always strip out photos that go along with the story, but it often does.

And, importantly, I haven’t parsed any of the javascript that Readability uses. As a person who’s concerned with privacy both offline and on, I worry that a tool like this could be used to track what you’re reading and where. I don’t have any reason to think that they are — and of course, Google is probably already doing this — but if someone handed you a camera and told you to click the button every time you read something, would you?

Get Readability here.