Reviewing “Reading Mode” from Google, an accessibility friendly tool
Finally Google made reading internet articles easy on Android
If you are using an Android phone, you know that reading articles on the browser is not very comfortable. There are ads, cross links to other articles, comment sections and many more distracting elements. In addition to this there are different types of font and font sizes which the website owners sometimes do not take much care of.
If you had used Safari browser on iPhone, iPad or Mac you might know that it has an inbuilt reader mode which shows a simplified version of the webpage with no ads, no other distractions and has simplest font to read.
“Google finally listened to the users”
Few months ago, Google listened to people like us and it launched “Reading Mode”. This app brings a lot of features from Apple’s reader view like simplified webpage alongwith detailed controls of choosing different fonts, font size, line height and additional option of making the entire text bold for people with disabilities. It has a lot of theming options such as blue text-black background, beige text-brown background etc. to make the reading comfortable as per your liking.
It also has options to listen to webpage and you can control the speed as well. Currently it is decent and does the job but is not upto the mark. It reads in a robotic tone, takes pauses at unexpected times. There’s no doubt that it is useful for the disabled people but could have been more efficient in today’s world of natural language processing.
This app can read only webpages and not your personal chats, text inside the apps. Since it is an accessibility focused feature so on enabling it is always present on the screen in form of a floating icon or the accessibility function icon. The best part is you can launch it from the quick settings as well.
It’s good but not perfect
Unlike Apple’s reader it currently doesn’t show images so the article may have some relevant image but you may miss the context while reading just the text. Also like mentioned above the text to speech needs to be improvised. But hey, atleast now there’s an app for it. And the best part is that it is not a part of the OS, so Google can improve and push updates.
You can download the app from the Play Store or learn more here.
What do you think of this app? Share your views :)
Thanks for reading. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well to talk and discuss designs, solutions and ideas :)
