Extending your Readability

In our region of Massachusetts we have a wonderful educational collaborative made up of 22 school districts in the Boston area. It was during the monthly meeting for school librarians that I learned about Readability. This nifty little toolbar extension strips ads and other sidebar distractions from the page.

This article from the Washington Times on the results of the mid-term elections is a great example. The first screenshot show the article with ads, video and pop-outs. Very distracting, especially for students with attention or reading disabilities.

With Readability on my Chrome toolbar I click the Blue R and the page looks like this. Just text, no distraction.


Readability also provides this embedded toolbar so the student can print or email the article in this cleaned up format. It works with Diigo, Evernote and other collaborative and note-taking platforms. What a boon for students!


Chrome and Firefox have lots of add-ons to improve accessibility. Just Google:
Firefox extensions or
Chrome extensions


You will find lots of tools to improve student productivity on the web, as well as your own.




Day 5 NaNoWriMo
(Not writing a novel. Using this as a prompt to blog daily for a month.)