Web Accessibility Tools : Readability

Readability is an extension that is available for Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome browsers. I will be reviewing the Firefox add-on. The main purpose of Readability is to make the web page text more readable by removing all the clutter such as advertisements, fancy fonts, and backgrounds.



Additional ease of use can be set with keyboard shortcuts. A user is able to customize their tool by adjusting text size, display style and margin width. Different display styles include rendering the page font like a newspaper, e-book or novel. In many cases of browsing, hyperlinks can have the ability to distract the user while they read an article. By enabling a simple option, hyperlinks can be converted to footnotes. An added bonus would be that every new page is generated with buttons to refresh the original page, print the new page or email the new page to someone else.

Although the tool seems like a very good idea, it is not without its flaws. Font choice is restricted to only 5 types. Similarly, rendered pages are displayed as either black on a light background or white font on a single dark background. Although this is standard, it would be nice to have some choice in the display colours. Not everyone has the same opinions on comfortable “reading” colours.

Even though in many cases, text is one of the most important parts of a web page, images can play an important role in adding context. Readability includes some, but not all images. However, for those that it does keep, the orientation of the images is lost. For example, if images are arranged side by side on the original page, the rendered version will place them one under the other. This is an important issue because any text that was below the initial side-by-side images will be wrapped beside the resulting column of images. As expected, the Readability tool works best with regular text based websites. Once they get fancy with flash-based sites, Readability no longer helps.

The Readability add-on is a very useful tool for those that wish to just get the meat of the website without being overwhelmed with clutter. Furthermore, it would be very helpful to individuals with conditions such as ADHD and are easily distracted.