Reading blinds – a bookmarklet to help me read easier
I am now a proud user of a 24 inch monitor at work and I realized that when I read large texts, the amount of white on the screen starts to hurt my eyes. Therefore I’ve written a small bookmarklet to black out part of the screen on demand and have a link top left to show and hide the blinds that cover the rest of the content. The blinds are fixed position so that I can scroll the content behind them. I also add padding to the bottom of the document to have enough scrolling space.
Here’s a blog without reading blinds:
The same blog with reading blinds on:
The bookmarklet is hosted on my server, to install it simply drag the following link to your links toolbar: Reading Blinds
Tags: accessibility, hack, readability, reading, scriptingenabled
September 25th, 2008 at 4:45 am
very usefully. you can built it as a plus-in for firefox
September 25th, 2008 at 8:07 am
That’s a really neat idea. Thank you very much for providing this handy bookmarklet.
Greetings
September 25th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Nice idea but I think it might work better if you could move the blind area with your cursor too as some text may appear below the blind area when you scroll to the bottom of the page.
September 25th, 2008 at 11:41 am
@si not really, I am adding a 90% height padding DIV to the page, so nothing should end up in the blinded spot. Did that happen to you?
September 26th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Nice work Chris, again i agree with @Si Jobling, it would be nice to have the blind move with the cursor.
September 28th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
+1 to following the cursor — I actually expected this behavior, so I’m bummed that that’s not built in by default. I know plenty of “highlight-readers” who highlight as they read — having the blind move with the cursor I think would be really helpful to these folks.
On a related subject, I highly recommend Tofu for reading long texts:
http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/
I set the font to 20pt Georgia with 180px wide columns and I’m to read MUCH faster in the columnar view.
September 28th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
This is great. I’ve used it so much already. Thank you very much!
October 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
This is a GREAT tool! Have you published a license to go along with it? Can the js file be distributed in GNU-GPL software designed for visually impaired individuals? Thank you for this wonderful tool!
October 31st, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Great idea but its buggy. On my system I can’t scroll to the bottom. For me I can’t see lower than “Antonia Hyde says:”. Not sure if you wanted to read the whole page with blinds…