Skim

Skim modifies the way words are displayed in NYT articles. It hopes to investigate if obscuring characters can enhance reading.
What is Skim?
Skim is a Chrome extension named Skim that modifies the way words are displayed in NYT articles. It provides three ways to view articles: DISEMVOWEL, SCRAMBLE, and SHAPES. It was built in a day as a prototype to investigate the legibility of modified words.

Extension stats

By: oeaeee
Users: 12 ▼ -2
Rating: 5.00 (1)
Version: 0.2.2 (Last updated: 2014-06-29)
Creation date: 2014-06-28
Risk impact: Low risk impact
Risk likelihood: Low risk likelihood
Manifest version: 2
Size: 74.83K

Other platforms

Not available on Firefox
Not available on Edge
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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.

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