Well shit

What the fuck. How could bolding half the word make me stutter in my own mind? This is absolutely unreadable. This gave me anxiety the moment i looked at it. This is like that one paragraph that talks about the letters being rearranged. Complete gibberish.

Wow. Web sites should have this option.

There is a firework extension that does this. Or at least there used to be.
Yes please.

I kept getting distracted by future bold letters and had to reread multiple times. The wording is also strange.

This appears to operate on the same speed-reading technique of “read only the spaces.”

It’s considered a beginner technique because although faster methods can be learned, this method can be used by many/most readers on their very first try.

Edit: also I’m not sure it has anything to do with neurodivergence.

Attention neurodivergent community - this bionic reading method is absolutely mind blowing. Your eyes scan the first bold letters and your brain center automatically completes the words. It lets you read twice as fast, is less overwhelming and helps you to stay focused. You will feel much more productive and a greater sense of achievement which will boost your confidence and makes you overall feel more positive. Let me know in the comments if this bionic reading method works for you.

Normal text for reference

I'm very skeptical, this text was easy, I need to look at a more difficult text using this. I don't think it would actually work

It would.

to be honest, it might be just me but i find this even more oberwhelming. its like the text is saying "THINK FAST, READ FAST GO GO GO GO" and yeah idk its more overwhelming

Might be tho because i was a bit stressed out by meself when i wrote this comment, now if i relax i actually just read faster my point stands tho

I thought too fast and now I'm sick

I can read it twice as fast and remember less than half of it.

My reading speed was never the problem. It's the reading comprehension and memory that limits me.

Ah, the "I read three pages but my brain was thinking about bees"
- God, this used to annoy me so bad. I'd read the same three paragraphs over and over again, only for my mind to wander immediately every time. I've since come to appreciate it though, because my mind usually wanders off to think about potential scenarios in the book I'm actively reading.
  Like what two characters might say if they were to have a conversation about something specific, or even how the current situation I'm trying to read about might progress (instead of just focusing on the damn words that give me that answer, thanks brain). Time spent daydreaming about a story I enjoy isn't time wasted IMO.
  Though, it's admittedly still very annoying when I'm trying to read something boring like a science or news article.
- What kind of bees?
- Yeah, wasp traps to protect bee colonies, are cool.
For me, it's both your points as well as a matter of current distractions. The real test would be if I could read/write something like this while somebody in the room has an unrelated conversation. Will it still hold my attention without the spoken words around me distracting me? Sadly, I have my doubts.

Doesn't work

This really doesn't feel like an ADHD exclusive thing.

I don't think it's supposed to be. I think it's just supposed to be easier for people who don't have the ADHD that lets them read a book cover to cover while calling deep vein thrombosis a punk ass bitch who wouldn't dare

What about this is "bionic"? And what part of the brain is the "brain center"?

What about this is "bionic"?
Try reading with this:

I'm skeptical about how much the bolding makes people read faster vs placebo of just telling people they should be reading faster. Also as other people stated, comprehension is what counts.

10's era WAOW!!! posting still survives!

This is absolutely gibberish. I have to solve a puzzle for every word. Yes, I can read it. The puzzles are compelling. I must solve each one even though i know what it is going to try and tell me. No, I cannot just read this.
It's actually because english is very redundant. Its a legibility thing.

Damn, it actually works.

But how the hell does it work? How...fucking brain is still a mystery

I've found with this type of text that if I try to read it normally, I struggle to process the change between the start and end of each word, and read much more slowly. If I try to read quickly though, it flows, as if I'm skimming the words but still understanding them properly.

It's a very strange feeling :)

Yeah I had a Firefox plugin earlier that turned all text to bionic, and I loved and hated it at the same time
Especially since it feels like you're reading in 1fps. It feels like stuttering
- It's a loosening of control, I think. Let the wheel turn on its own, you're still there to steer as needed, but let the inertia do the work. 🤓
- what plugin?
Oddly enough, I find myself processing text with a regular font in both ways from time to time. Sometimes it flows like I'm reading half of the words but still absorbing every bit. Other times I notice the end of a paragraph and can't tell you what I just read.

I love this in principle but I can’t use it myself. I‘m a very fast reader by default, basically already doing what the highlighting tries to make you do, without it needing to be there. The highlighting disrupts that for me. I end up stopping at every word and partially jumping back and forth. I do show this to people on occasion that aren’t as lucky as me with their reading speed and most said it helped them. Not all though.

it slowed my reading in the same way.
Felt wierd realy, like I couldn't read ahead while my inner voice was "saying" it.
- Can you expand on that? I have never been a fast reader and speed reading takes the pleasure out of it for me. So, mainly story books, I read at the same pace as a speaker might say them outloud. As if my minds voice is reading them allowed in a chair to the child me setting quietly on the ground. Speed reading feels like watching a show in fast-forward. Great for boring parts but not enjoyable to me.
  How does your inner voice feel as you read?
- For me, it completely messed up my whole-word and multi-word reading by shape. Like, I don't read by syllable because I'm not pronouncing the words, I'm just reading the meaning of the whole word directly from the shape of the whole word (or several words), if that makes sense?
  Like, when I'm reading, my inner monologue is only "saying" a handful of key words in each sentence, as it fluidity skips over "mentally pronouncing" all the filler/context words.
  This completely breaks that. It splits each word into two chunks, neither of which is the word, so I need to show down to "mentally say" both chunks of each word to read them. Like, it's still fast, I guess, but I'd estimate it slows me down by ⅓-½ish and disrupts my reading comprehension significantly.
  I assume that if I read like that for a few hours, I'd likely get used to it, but why bother?
  On the other hand, I think that could be a great reading tool, I imagine especially for people with dyslexia, but probably most fluent but slow readers.
- This is the most accurate description I've ever seen of how I read
- I've sort of always read that way, inner voice and all. When I learned that really fast readers figure out how to ignore that, or do it naturally, my mind was blown.

I feel like you could take a piece of text and do this using python. I should try at some point.

This reads like one of my brother’s brainrot videos being read by an AI.

I hate it. Made me read twice as fast and use four times as much brainpower to comprehend it.

Same, I was hoping to burn 20 seconds of my life and instead it took only 10
I read pretty fast but it takes a lot of mental energy to pay attention to every word. I could read that very fast and it cost me a very low amount of mental energy.
The reason it works is because it makes it harder for the brain.

Book's Story e-reader supports this by the way:

Plug in your phone, you’re at 1%’!
- If only it was bold :(
Wow, thanks I was looking for a replacement to ReadEra, I didn't find this with F-Droid's search
- I kinda like ReadEra (premium)...
  I use OpenDyslexic font, and let the text-to-speech help to keep me tracking.
- Same! Awesome.

Is't aslo vrey esay to raed olny the frsit and lsat lteters

This picture is yelling half of every word at me

Yeah, I could read it faster but it also feels like it's messing with my eyes. I think anything of real length in this style would give me a headache.

The OpenDyslexic font helped with me. Does a similar thing.

https://opendyslexic.org/

I used to use a browser extension to do this, mostly liked it until I tried to convert all my ebooks to it as well. It’s works, but it technically splits the words into two objects in order to change the font, which makes searching the book nearly impossible because typing a whole word will no longer find instances of it, instead you have to search for either half. Only an issue for ebooks, but it sort of turned me off of using this in general. Also I believe it’s “technically” copyrighted. I remember encountering something that wanted me to pay to use this. I found alternatives, but still, just left a bad taste in my mouth even though it helped. It did help me naturally read faster even without it, because rather than directly processing each letter I can do a sort of exclusion based search of my vocabulary as I process each letter. After 2 or 3, sometimes 4 letters, and with context I can correctly assume the rest of the word and move on.

This "tech" has been out for a while but I don't know that we can easily get it on our phones and computers for general reading :(.

Anyone know?

There's a bionic reader extension for Firefox that works on mobile, but obvs that only works on webpages
- Most such phone apps should be web pages, and the good ones usually have a web-page version.
Librera on fdroid also has this feature (but not referred to as "bionic")
Settings > Advanced Settings > Highlighting Initial Letters

So what's the plugin to switch to this by default?

I think there's one called bionic reader on Firefox
- Thanks, seems to work on waterfox

You already read like this. After the first few weeks of you learning to read as a child you probably didn't read each word letter-by-letter already

Ineded

This also works with neurotypicals tho...

Opposite effect for me. I read that much slower than my normal speed

Works for me, but triggers an uncanny-valley/discomfort effect whict Sprint Reader doesn't.

This just hurts my brain 😭

I'm not ADHD, but that particular passage using that particular font and those particular colors seemed to speed up my ability to read the text. But when Staments posted below (https://lemmy.zip/post/45655234/20636698) using what looks like the same methodology, it ended up being an impediment. I struggled to even get through the first sentence.

So I have to wonder if there's more to it than just randomly putting a character or few in bold at the start of each word -- like maybe it's also highly dependent on things like the font being use and making sure to use specific words and phrases that are conducive to this technique.

To be fair, when I open that link, I get light gray text on a dark brown-or-yellow-greyish background which isn't that easily readable for me - at least contrast wise.

Reading this is like pointing an information machine gun on my brain and pulling the trigger. I read the first sentence faster and then the buffer overflows and I have to constantly stop reading or re-read stuff because the comprehension part of my brain cannot keep up. I feel like I naturally already kinda read like this, I don't read character for character but kinda skim words and know what it says. The image forces me to read in a very unnatural way because I cannot properly use the last part of the word for extra confidence in these predictions.

Holy shit, did I just get diagnosed?

No

Hmm, this doesn't work for me, for some reason. I end up having to pause at the beginning of each word, like a child trying to sound out words while reading. It's not matching the flow and I feel like something is constantly off...

The fuck

It helps me read faster, but IDK what effect it has on comprehension in a longer text. If I struggled to read I might be tempted to try it, but thankfully that's not one of my many issues.

I personally read that passage faster than normal (2x-ish), but yeah, zero comprehension afterwards. If my brain is just filling in the blanks for the back half of every word I'm not actually "reading", I'm solving a puzzle and then on to something else.

Now I read it twice longer

I think that was debunked once but i am lazy to find the related survey / study.

It seems disproven, or perhaps only useful to some subset of people they haven't pinpointed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824001811
Honestly though if it helps someone they should ride that placebo as far as it takes them!
I read the study @BCOVertigo@lemmy.world linked and the following statements can be made:
for 32 university students with normal vision and without dyslexia who have not encountered bionic reading before
There was no statistical relevant difference between bionic and normal texts regarding reading speed and comprehension
There was no statistical relevant difference between faster and slower readers
There was no statistical relevant difference when given time to adapt to bionic reading
but
in bayesian analysis there was no strong evidence for either the null- or the alternative hypothesis (meaning an effect cannot be ruled out) even tho the sample size should have been enough to do just that, meaning it could still have an effect, but it would also mean that if it did, it wouldn't be something to recommend to someone out of the blue because the relevance for singular people is negligible
the study did not test people with dyslexia, ADHD or vision impairment, so for those groups no statement can be made.
There were no studies following up on these results, so if someone wants to go for it, it's free real estate!

How do I get this on a kindle?

Thanks now I'm reading the sentences second half first...

Only started working halfway through reading this...but I think this is overall crap. You read however fast you read.

So that you mean that it took a few moments to adjust? Almost like you weren't going to immediately be able to jump onto the skill instantly and that you needed some more time? Perhaps immediately coming to the conclusion that it is terrible and not worth the time after only a brief experience with the usage of such a thing isn't the best thing to do. Then again, perhaps calling it crap based off of your own personal experiences when other people in this thread are saying otherwise is a bit narrow minded? Expand your horizons. Let people be people and phrase your opinions as them. Not everything is going to be universal. Live long and prosper, my friend. Have a good day.
Edit: The fact y'all are downvoting this polite message saying "Don't unilaterally call something shit that others enjoy" says way more about you than it ever could about my comment ¯(ツ)_/¯
- I personally get a headache trying to read this, so it would be hard to practice… Words seem to flow faster though, need someone record their time reading with and without this
- The original post works for me, but seeing this the way my Voyager is set up ended up making it slower for me. The bold white letters on my black theme just made the letters merge into a mush here.
  So I guess for it to work it would have to be set up in a particular way that works with the reader.
- This is weird, it helps me read the words faster but my comprehension is massively reduced. Like all I'm seeing are words and losing the sentence.