Making the Internet a Little Easier on Aging Eyes
New Software Enlarges and Reformats Text
to Make Web sites Reader-Friendly
The Mossberg Solution/ By Walter S. Mossberg
As seen in The Wall Street Journal
Lots of people dread having to read long articles on a computer screen. For many folks, especially aging baby boomer, the font size on Web sites seems to be getting mysteriously smaller year after year, causing them to squint, change glasses and crane their necks to see the screen clearly.
On top of these irksome small fonts, Web sites often aren’t set up in formats that are conducive to reading. Text often runs in a narrow vertical stack between advertisements that litter the left and right margins with blinking graphics and animated figures. Lately, many ads even expand to cover part of the text until you can find the tiny icon that turns them off. So, it’s easy to be distracted.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Windows, the most common Web browser, lets you change a Web site’s text size by selecting from five viewing adjustments, ranging from smallest to largest. But these adjustments still leave some wishing for even larger fonts or a more clearly organized reading format. In fact, boosting the text size this way can badly distort the layout of some pages while leaving others unaffected and forcing extra scrolling on still others.
Windows also provides a Magnifier utility, which blows up everything on the screen—browser and other programs—for easier reading. But it displays the exploded text in a separate window that can be hard to us, and the letters become jagged and rough-looking.
There are some add-on products to increase readability, but they are often costly. And many affect the whole PC rather than just the Web browser. These are largely aimed at people with serious vision impairments, not just aging eyesight. For instance, A Vermont company called Ai Squared makes three different types of magnification software, but they range in price from $99 to 595 and offer much more elaborate solutions.
This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a cheaper, simpler solution that's just aimed at making the Web easier to read. It's a $24.95 downloadable software program for Windows users called Web Eyes, from a Missouri firm called Ion Systems. The program can be downloaded from the webeyes.us site, or for $34.95 the company will mail it to you. Web Eyes embeds itself into Internet Explorer (versions 5.5 and up) and adds a special toolbar to the top of the browser. This toolbar includes options for changing a Web site's text size and navigating through a page that go far beyond what Microsoft offers. But its most interesting feature is one that reformats a whole page for easier reading.
Katie and I each downloaded a free 15-day trial of Web Eyes and used it while reading online throughout the past week. Overall, we found the product useful and easy to apply to every Web site that we tested.
To adjust the font of any article, we clicked on the red plus and minus buttons in the toolbar to enlarge or shrink text size accordingly. Using the plus and minus signs, font size can be adjusted up to 144-point type; you can also manually enter any font size that you want. While reading an especially long article from Slate.com, Katie increased the type size by clicking the "plus" sign twice and could sit back in her office chair while reading.
I tested Web Eyes on a long article at the Web site of the magazine U.S. News & World Report. The text size feature of Internet Explorer had no effect on the small type of this particular page. But Web Eyes blew it up to any size I liked, and the enlarged text remained smooth and sharp, with none of the jagged effects produced by the built-in Windows Magnifier.
I also liked another feature of Web Eyes, called Page Control, which allows you to easily and rapidly pan and scroll through pages with a few mouse clicks.
But the most unusual feature of Web Eyes is called “Read Like a Book.” If you click on the book icon while looking at a Web site, a new window opens to display the Web site’s data arranged in column formant, which is much easir to read. At the top of the new window, you can select icons to view text only, text with illustrations or text with markings where illustrations would be on the Web site.
From the “Read Like a Book” window, the text will still include all links from the original page; when you click them, the new text opens up in the “Read Like a Book” window. You can also change the text font, in addition to the size. Katie took advantage of this by setting her font on One Stroke Script LET, which was easy for her to read.
You move through these book-like versions of Web pages by just clicking on the “next page” and the “previous page” buttons. An indicator at the lower right of the book window shows how many pages the document contains, and which page you’re on.
There are limits to this reformatting of Web pages. The book window can still be littered with irrelevant material from the original Web page, which can take so much space that it takes several page turns to get to the text you want. And for longer articles—ones that for more than one page on the original site—you’ll have to click on the link in the text to bring you to the next segment.
But, the “Read Like a Book” option does make reading long articles much easier, especially when coupled with the text size and font choices the program provides.
If you have trouble reading online because of awkwardly small text sizes or strange fonts, or if you aren’t comfortable with the format in which a Web page’s data are arranged, Web Eyes might change the way you read online. Reading from a computer screen still won’t be as comfortable as reading on paper, but Web Eyes software is a step in the right direction.
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