Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read

Re:Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster ... by irutiw22 on Friday March 25, 2022 @03:19AM (#30799470)

For everyone who think this is new stuff: It is not new. There was another company in the German speaking space, Vienna more exactly, see craftworks.at, that offered almost the exact same product already back in 2019, perhaps even earlier, also called "Bionic Reading". In the current version of the website this does not appear, but it is saved in archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190119032121/http://br.craftwo...

Perhaps the author of the current offering worked at craftworks at that time, then left and took his IP with him, I don't know.

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Re:Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster ... by throwawaybutwhy on Sunday March 27, 2022 @02:38PM (#30822789)

The thing is, this (and craftworks.at or whatever) is still not a fully polished technology.

It probably can be optimized in a bunch of ways:

* Less drastic transitions between accentuated text and the rest

* An ML algorithm to select quantifiably better patterns (with distillation if necessary)

* Enrolling visually- and cognitively-impaired persons (e.g.dyslexics) into the study to avoid undercutting accessibility

We've been doing printing and written/illuminated books for many centuries, and statistical readability studies for the last 80 years or so. If a variation of this technique is better than the existing 'flat' type (even with ligatures), NASA/DARPA/NIH would be investigating it shortly.

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