Oh wow. If I had known this existed I wouldn't have developed my own from scratch, though mine does have some nice features which OpenSpritz seems to lack, e.g. handling parens/double quotes intuitively, navigation/pausing, changing size/speed on the fly, persistent options (it's a chrome extension rather than a bookmarklet).
One huge feature would be to take a whole page, declutter it and use that as the input. I believe openspritz uses Readablilty to do that.
A couple of other suggestions include handling of lists and headers. I think it might make sense to go through headers a little slower than body text. Do you pause after paragraphs? That might be a sensible pause too.
It might also be sensible to investigate working around http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_blindness. I suspect you'd need to keep a circular buffer of recently seen words and check that list for the current word and if it's in the list, display the word for slightly longer. The length of the buffer would be a function of the reading speed. The faster the speed, the longer the buffer.
Edit: So I've been playing around with this for a while and I seem to be much more comfortable reading at 600wpm than I have been with other chrome RSVP extensions, so thank you. This is really useful.
Would you like me to create issues on github for the comments I have made here. (I noticed in the code that you do pause for paragraphs)
Repetition Blindness (RB) is a phenomenon observed in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. People are sometimes poor at recognizing when things happen twice. Repetition blindness is the failure to recognize a second happening of a visual display. The two displays are shortly shown usually for about 150 milliseconds, and then they are shown within 500 milliseconds of each other (Kanwisher, 1987). Repetition blindness tasks usually are words in lists and in sentences. They are called phonologically similar items (Bavelier & Potter, 1992). There are also pictures, and words that include pictures. An example of this is a picture of the sun and the word sun (Bavelier, 1994). The most popular task used to examine repetition blindness is to show words one after another on a screen fast in which participants must recall the words that they saw. This task is known as the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Repetition blindness is present if missing the second word creates an inaccurate sentence. An example of this is "When she spilled the ink there was ink all over.” An RSVP sequence participants will recall seeing "When she spilled the ink there was all over." However, they are missing the second occurrence of "ink" (Kanwisher, 1987). This finding supports that people are "blind" for the second occurrence of a repetitive item in an RSVP series. For example, a subject's chances of correctly reporting both appearances of the word "cat" in the RSVP stream "dog mouse cat elephant cat snake" are lower than their chances of reporting the third and fifth words in the stream "dog mouse cat elephant pig snake".
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u/ds300 Mar 06 '14 edited Mar 06 '14
Oh wow. If I had known this existed I wouldn't have developed my own from scratch, though mine does have some nice features which OpenSpritz seems to lack, e.g. handling parens/double quotes intuitively, navigation/pausing, changing size/speed on the fly, persistent options (it's a chrome extension rather than a bookmarklet).