This morning I added another small tool to my personal toolbox: an RSVP reader for my own site.
RSVP stands for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. The idea is simple: instead of moving your eyes across a page, the text comes to you one word at a time. Your eye stays fixed, the reader controls the pace, and the page stops being a page for a bit.
That sounds like a speed-reading trick, and maybe it is. But for me the useful part is not just speed. It is focus.
I have mild dyslexia. I have written about audiobooks and written about building dyslexia tools before. Reading is not impossible for me, but it can be expensive. A normal page gives my brain a lot of places to wander: line breaks, links, formatting, the scroll bar, the next paragraph, the whole shape of the document.
So I built the reader around the small things that make this useful for me:
- It strips Markdown and page structure down to readable text, because formatting is useful until it becomes noise.
- It fixes the eye on one highlighted letter in each word, because the word needs an anchor.
- It adds guide lines above and below the word, because the eye should not have to search for the center.
- It pauses a little longer at sentence endings, because otherwise the next sentence arrives too fast.
- It can reveal the previous and next words on hover, because sometimes I need just a bit of context without going back to the whole page.
- It has a
/rsvppage where I can paste anything, because not everything I need to read lives on my site. - It is reusable across the blog and other content pages, because my own writing should be readable with the same focused interface.
That is the part I like most: this is not just a page feature. It is another small tool in my reading setup.
My site can now publish text, but it can also help me read it.