Skim
Skim Chrome Extension - Modify the way words are displayed
Extension stats
Other platforms
Extension summary
Studies suggest humans can read pretty well even when many characters in a word have been modified. Some studies imply that if the first and last letters of a word are kept intact, the rest can be scrambled without much loss in legibility. Others say we read based on the shapes of whole words rather than letters. Skim is a quick prototype to investigate these ideas.
It provides three ways to view New York Times articles: (1) DISEMVOWEL - where vowels are removed, (2) SCRAMBLE - where interior letters are shuffled, (3) SHAPES - where interior letters are masked to show only their ascenders and descender.
Skim was built in a day and is imperfect. While it’s intentional that words with three or fewer characters are not modified, things like punctuation were left unaccounted for due to time constraints. If you’d like to build off of this project, it’s available on Github (https://github.com/oeaeee/skim).
Extension safety
Risk impact
Skim requires very minimum permissions.
Risk likelihood
Skim has earned a fairly good reputation and likely can be trusted.
Similar extensions
Here are some Chrome extensions that are similar to Skim:
5.00
4.67
4.50
3.00
3.00
N/A
2.75
5.00
4.50
5.00
4.67
3.17