Make Websites More Readable (and Printable)

Do you print out articles from the web for your students to read?

 

 

An article as seen before (top) and after (bottom) using Readability

When you find an article on a website these days, even reputable ones, you don’t just see the article.  You see multiple ads, sidebars with links to other stories, Facebook and Twitter links and live feeds, and a whole slew of other things to distract you or your students from the main content on the web page.  If you want to print out a copy of that article for your students, often all of that crap that you don’t want gets printed, too.  Grrr.  Of course, some websites do have a link to a cleaner “printable” version of their articles, but what do we do about those websites that don’t?

Solution 1: Readability

To set up Readability, visit their website, choose the layout that you like the best, and drag their Bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark bar.  You can choose from several different text styles, including “Novel”, which puts serif text on a tan background, and “E-book”, which puts sans-serif text on a light-gray background, amongst others.  You can specify the margin size, and even turn hyperlinks into footnotes (which is great for printing out the article since you can’t click a hyperlink on physical paper anyway).  Then, when you visit the website in question, you click on that Readability Bookmarklet that you just created and, voilà, all the crap is instantly gone, leaving nicely formatted, readable text.  Don’t worry, the relevant images are kept, too.

Solution 2: Instapaper

Instapaper does the same thing as readability, but in a different way.  Again, you go to Instapaper’s website, grab their bookmarklet, and copy it to your browser’s bookmark bar (you do have to sign up for a free account, also).  However, when you click it while viewing a web article, contrary to the name of the tool, it doesn’t instantly change what’s on the page.  Instead, it saves the article to your account on Instapaper’s site.  When you go back to Instapaper’s site, you can look at all of your “Instapaper’d” articles in a text-only stripped-down format.  It is more meant as a save-for-later-reading tool, but it also does a great job of formatting the article into a more readable incarnation.

Which is Better?

The disadvantage that Instapaper has over Readability is that you don’t have control over how it’s formatted.  You also have to go through the extra step of going back to the Instapaper site to view the more readable version of the article.  The advantage, however, is that you also get a saved permanent link to the original article.  Instapaper also has additional features, such as downloading for offline viewing and apps for iPhone and other mobile devices, and it will combine multi-page articles into a single page.

In both cases, they’re not perfect.  Using a computer algorithm to try to figure out what is important and what is chaff on a webpage is bound to have limitations.  On rare occasions, they do leave in an advertisement or cut off a paragraph.  However, for the most part, I have found that both do a pretty darn good job at making web-based articles a little more readable, and a lot less annoying.

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