[mykeliu]

My focus wanders quite a bit when doing anything in general, so I highlight text when reading webpages to help anchor my attention and forcefully keep track of where I am.

Otherwise, my eyes tend to jump around the page in a horribly ineffective attempt to speed-read and I miss a lot of details.

[gnicholas]

The reading behavior you describe is common among people who use my startup’s software, which assists visual tracking when reading. Sorry if this is taking things too far off-topic, but hopefully this is helpful for some of the people who highlight while reading on-screen.

http://www.beelinereader.com/individual

[antisthenes]

Where are the peer-reviewed studies for this?

I'm interested to see the statistics on people who found it easier to do with your app than without.

My personal result was 3% extra speed, which is decent but not too impressive. Was wondering what the average & median were.

[gnicholas]

There are several independent (but not peer-reviewed) studies, mostly done with students. In that context, reading fluency gains can be up to 100% in the course of a month. But for adult readers the max would be around 30%, with the average around 20% and the median a bit below that.

For some people, speed is the only thing they care about, and I'd agree that 3% isn't a huge bump. But for others, the primary benefit is ease of reading, especially for long periods of time. This ease benefit is subjective and therefore hard to measure (vision scientists tend to look at blink rate, but this is an imperfect proxy), but in our experience about 85% of readers find it easier with the colors. Interestingly, this varies by device size, with a more pronounced effect on smaller screens.

[SirZimzim]

Your site cuts off on the right hand side on Chrome Android. There is also no margin on the sides which doesn't give me a lot faith in an app that is supposed to assist with visual guidance of reading.

[gnicholas]

Thanks for the feedback—the website was relaunched recently and although I was assured it worked on all major platforms I was only able to test with my own device. Would love to know what size your screen is, since this is likely linked to that.

[compuguy]

I wanted to try this, but apparently your Firefox extension is not version 58 compatible at the moment.

[gnicholas]

It is not—this is something we are working on still. Sad for us too—Firefox is my daily driver! Hope to have this out in the next couple months, but it's not a simple port, unfortunately.