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Startup idea for you: A button to make websites readable

8 points by CatDancer ↗ HN
The world is full of unreadable websites: sites that have poor contrast such as dark gray text on a light gray background; sites that have tiny fonts; sites that obscure their content in a sea of advertising and widgets, sites that block their content with popup advertising...

These unreadable websites are especially painful for older people to deal with, since often their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, and not being as tech savvy they are more easily confused by clutter and distractions. But the older demographic isn't a bad one for startups to target though, since one thing older people do have is money.

This startup idea is simple: create a bookmarklet (see, for example, http://www.google.com/bookmarks or http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html) labeled "Readable". When the user gets to an unreadable page, they click on your "Readable" button in their bookmarks toolbar, and your site renders for them a readable version of the page that they're on.

You can include a small, tasteful header at the top of the page which includes a "Nope, not good!" button which gives you immediate feedback on which pages you are messing up when you try to render them in a readable fashion.

The core algorithm could be pretty simple: scan the page for the larger blocks of natural language text and display that. You don't have to be perfect, since if you miss anything of importance on the page the user can always click the "back" button to return to the original.

38 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 77.5 ms ] thread
robg
Try ctrl+ in firefox.
carlio
Add this as a bookmark:

javascript:location.href = "http://www.google.co.uk/gwt/n?mrestrict=xhtml&u=" + location.href

It uses Google transcoder. I've only tried this in Firefox but it should work in IE too.

CatDancer
An improvement, but the result is still pretty ugly.

Displays content in a smaller, harder to read font than my default.

No button to give feedback "you messed up, I can't read your 'readable' version".

carlio
Ok so it won't win any awards but not many startups can have a prototype done in 5 minutes!

What you're suggesting at the core is basically what mobile transcoders already try to do, and any document classification system which needs to work out the most important content. It's a hard problem but there is plenty of thoughts out there to build on.

What you could do, even, is build a "meta-service" on top of something like Google's transcoder, where you pass the site into Google, then transcode /it's/ results to add a nicer style and the usability stuff like the feedback link. That would be a way to get something started pretty quickly, and you could use the feedback to see where Google isn't good enough, and therefore how to improve the service.

How would you make money though?

joshsharp
Not to be facetious, but can't you get this by choosing View > Page Style > No style in Firefox, to remove all stylesheets?
twism
... or Ctrl + Alt + s with the developer toolbar addon in firefox.
twism
Shift + Ctrl + s
thwarted
This opens the bookmarks sidebar in my firefox. Exactly which functionality are we expecting here?
thwarted
Ah, there I see it it in web developer toolbar Options | Options | Keys setting list. Nice key combo conflict.
CatDancer
Sure, I do this all the time, but it plasters the entire contents of the page on the screen. The result is not what my grandmother would consider readable.
thaumaturgy
In Windows 2000 and XP, Control Panel -> Accessibility Options -> Display -> Use High Contrast.
slackbp
View-Style-User Mode in Opera 9.5 (or Alt-v-s-u).
brm
There is a huge difference between cool/ interesting idea and good startup idea.
CatDancer
What is missing?
sysop073
A bookmarklet isn't really a solid business, this is something somebody with a spare free day would write because they're bored
chrisbroadfoot
Doesn't startup imply business?
swombat
Indeed.

There is no business in this idea. It's a nice hack to work on in your spare time one afternoon.

atestu
Instapaper (http://instapaper.com) does that.
CatDancer
Requires registration. The bookmarklet "saves for later", does not display the page in a readable form.
atestu
I know, but you can just save it, and then click on "Text"
orib
This is not a startup idea. It may be a small Firefox (or even Greasemonkey) extension. However...

This is one of the reasons I think CSS should have been designed to be selected client side, not server side. (in other words, the CSS is selected by the user's browser options)h I should be able to decide how I view my websites, not some two-bit wanna-be web designer who thinks that black text on a black background makes GREAT contrast.

Ok, I exaggerate, and it's only rarely that I come across sites that are that horrid (that I still want to read, at least), but the point I'm making is that the theming should be in my hands.

If HTML was more semantic (<navbar><navitem.../></navbar>) it might even mean that mobile browsers don't have to work as hard trying to figure out what to do with massive sidebars that push the content down 30 scrollbar lengths; they just shove the <navbar> stuff into a dropdown menu, for example.

And thus ends my mini-rant about annoying style issues. Things are too embedded to change any time in the near future, even if everyone on the W3C completely agreed, but one can still dream...

sysop073
Sites can be designed semantically and thus easily themed (e.g. http://www.csszengarden.com/ lets you apply totally different themes easily), but most sites are designed poorly
orib
No, What I want isn't possible with CSS adding turing-completeness to CSS, or using massive javascript hacks, and special-casing every browser out there. And even then, you'd end up with inconsistent behavior across websites.

I want to be able to -- for example -- on my blackberry, just drop the navigation into a button that I click on to show the links. I want the titlebar of a site to drop all the images -- don't even download them. Data is expensive in Canada.

I want to have the list of subscribers turn into a simple link to a new page, and only display the body of the article I'm reading. Anything else can be hidden in a menu in the browser (file->navigation->list of links, perhaps?)

And most importantly, I want to configure this on my end. I don't want to be constrained to the web designer's lame ideas about layout

thwarted
I'm not sure what "the titlebar of a site to drop all the images" means.

I remember the early browsers (we're talking Mosaic and Netscape .9 here) having support for "navigational links" (although Wikipedia only talks about the link element, and doesn't have much information on this) rendered as a list of buttons across the top of the rendering frame. The only place I remember seeing this heavily used was on some site that Eolas (http://eolas.com/, yes, the plug-in patent Eolas, who I was tangentially involved with back in the mid-90s). I don't think it caught on because, really, internal, embedded links are more a more valuable, user-friendly, and web-page UI component. Additionally, I don't think many designers (or whatever you called people who built web pages back then) used them because it was kind of an obscure feature and it didn't get you as much control over the display as even a simple list of links did back then. It's really something that should be brought back, but it would most likely get abused anyway. The limited space used in the original rendering would make navigation more difficult, as the site author would consider different things to be important to navigate to than actual users would (for example, how often do you actually need instant access to the "about us" page?).

I find it tremendously useful to have a site's shitty design, layout and navigation help indicate early on, before I get frustrated with it, if the site is even worth visiting or coming back to. "Well, the person behind this site obviously doesn't want me to find anything on it, time to head somewhere else".

Tichy
I think that was actually the intention of CSS, and you can also somehow tell Firefox to use stylesheets of your own liking. I can't tell you how, because I have never needed that feature.
orib
Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.

The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.

    <div id="header">
        ...
    </div>
only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.
orib
Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.

The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.

    <div id="header">
        ...
    </div>
only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.
tjpick
HTML _is_ more semantic. It's perfect for marking up text.
auston
..or you could just remove styles and increase text size.
Tichy
I find it a little bit annoying if every tiny project is called startup.
geuis
wow, so many comments to a simple problem.

File->Print preview

paraschopra
Why don't you simply do it then? Stop discussing here and start doing.
MrUnderbridge
"The world is full of unreadable websites: sites that have poor contrast such as dark gray text on a light gray background"

Is this for real? You just described this very page.

I wouldn't pay money for this if some "startup" was selling it, but I did take the trouble to create an account so I could post a big WTF in ya face.