Readability, or Maybe I’m Just Getting Old
Last year, I found myself having to remove my glasses to read a piece of paper in my hand. A quick trick to the optometrist confirmed that it was time to start to be more like my Dad and switch to progressive lenses. In case you’re still a kid, “progressive lenses” is the modern euphemism for “bifocals” (because bifocals seems so — I don’t know — so Ben Franklin). But progessives are also like “stealth” bifocals because they don’t have that little sideways D-shaped lens-within-a-lens my grandmother’s glasses had. Whew. Still hip.
Anyway. Perhaps another evidence of my increasing Ben Franklinness is my newfound love of Readability, a little product from the Arc90 Labs.
Readability is a configurable bookmarklet you drop in your browser toolbar. Say you encounter a page for a magazine article or weblog post that has a narrow column of tiny type (at least to my increasingly Franklinesque eyesight), like this:
You click the Readability bookmarklet, and it reformats the page for you, stripping out all of the cruft (headers, ads, linkrolls, etc.) providing you with a simple readable format, like so:
My eyes thank you, Arc 90.