A different way to read

In a world that is increasingly more immersive digitally it would be easy to take it for granted and forget that not everyone is able to experience it the same way. We have different impairments that might affect a person’s ability to immerse themselves into this.

This entry will not explicitly cover accessibility and best practices in general as that is already covered adequately elsewhere. Rather we shall go over what I believe is probably an outlier. How does one read on the web if they have dyslexia? How are young learners affected by the way text is presented to them? Classes are increasingly going online but do we know how this has impacted their reading experience?

I don't have a lot of the answers to that, but I came across a tool that claims to help with that.

So, what is the Beeline Reader?

According to the Northern Arizona University¹ website:

BeeLine Reader is a research-backed tool that improves reading ability for students of all ages and skill levels. By displaying text using color gradients that wrap from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, BeeLine facilitates visual tracking and enables the reader to focus on other aspects of reading, such as decoding and comprehension. The technology facilitates a higher degree of reading comprehension among all students, but is particularly helpful for students with attention deficits, vision impairments and dyslexia.

By now you will have noticed that this article makes use of the concepts described in the blurb. Did it make it easier for you to read so far?²

It took some getting used for me, but I did like that I could intuitively land on the next line, a pattern that could be really useful for long form texts like you would find in investigative writing on The Atlantic and other news websites.

The colour gradient also feels off and from the initial glance the page design looks all over the place, like a clown costume. I did try various colour combinations but the red & blue³ combination was the best for this first draft. I chose not to include the reference links in the gradient but that also makes them harder to discern from the rest of the text.

I came across a study⁴ testing the efficacy of the beeline reader and the findings concluded that:

we conclude that BeeLine Reader might be useful, but only for some beginning readers in some situations. Potential users should keep in mind that BeeLine Reader is a charged application with no clear theoretical underpinnings and may have a detrimental effect on reading speed, reading comprehension, and more subjective readability measures

BeeLine Reader may reflect a contemporary substitute for traditional ‘finger tracking’ techniques (i.e., the movement of a child's index finger that points to printed text while reading)

presenting texts with BeeLine layouts to beginning readers may ultimately hamper their reading skills for texts with a traditional layout – just like learning how to ride a bicycle by using lateral training wheels may not always present an optimal learning situation

The study also notes that while Beeline Reader claims to be "a research-backed tool that improves the reading ability for students of all ages and skill levels" the findings didn’t support the claim, and in fact may make it harder for beginners to switch from the gradient format to the traditional layout. From personal experience the font choice plays a huge role in the reading speed and visual fatigue levels.

By now you have noticed the study focused primarily on beginner readers, but I will create an updated entry covering studies featuring people with dyslexia as I find them.

Like all tools, the use of the Beeline Reader is a matter of preference. It is good to know that accessibility nuances are also looked into and (seemingly) edge-cases are taken into consideration.

That said, I would like to get some perspective from you. Was this article easier to read?