These days reading content online can quite a pain. The content that we want is lost in an ocean of junk (see image).

On top of that every site has different text styling, text sizing, etc, etc.

I recently came across a great solution: Readability.

Readability is a ‘bookmarklet’ that will update any site you’re looking at to be more readable.

This is how it works:

1. You choose some preferences up front (i.e. font size and type)
2. Drag the link provided onto your browser links bar
3. When you’re reading a site with a lot of gunk hit the bookmark
4. Readability will update the site to make it more readable

Basically the program will go through the page and extract the ‘content’ and then show only that content according to your formatting preferences.

In the example image here Readability would find the blue block and then show then content of that block according to your preferences.

Because the program must figure out which content is relevant this process doesn’t work every time. Some sites are not compatible.

That said, I find Readability very useful and often make use of it.