Asym

Asymmetrica's browser extension for English dynamically and transparently formats all of the web pages that you visit. The extension adds an unobtrusive icon to your browser's menu bar to tell you that it's working.

Good readers have longer eye movements, shorter fixations (pauses during reading), and make fewer regressions (backtracking movements)—a pattern which makes reading more efficient and more effective than for poor readers. Asym works by providing all readers visual cues within the text that subtly encourage the eye movement patterns that good readers have learned to do naturally. These visual reminders help readers to pause and chunk phrases into units of meaning when the brain would naturally pause during sentence comprehension.

This technique of emphasizing units of meaning with visual cues has been laboratory and field-tested by scientists in a variety of disciplines for over 60 years in dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. These studies have demonstrated that this technique improves reading speed, comprehension, and enjoyment by 10-40%.

All readers—especially struggling readers—will benefit from and be able to read faster and understand more.

The extension currently supports English, German, Spanish, and French, and other languages are in the works!

FAQs from our website:

• Will Asym make my browser load pages slower?

No, Asym is applied asynchronously while your browser is loading the webpage. Once your browser completes loading the page, you may see the text reflow with the Asym spacing as the spaces are “snapped” into place after the text is rendered. This change is just a sign that Asym spaces are there helping you to read better and doesn’t slow your browser down.

• Do you change or rewrite content?

No. Asym makes only micro-typographic changes to the spacing between words. Asym never changes the wording, grammar, or punctuation, and won’t change the layout or design of your website or document.

• Why do I need to create an account for the Asym extension?

We use this "account" to authenticate you with our API servers, and to prevent abuse. This also allows us to provide custom reading improvements for each user.

• Does Asym store my content or browsing history?

No. We only store basic server usage data and statistics on the language of what you read. We want to improve our models, but the actual content of what you read is your business, not ours.