
Startup idea for you: A button to make websites readable - CatDancer
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...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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brm
There is a huge difference between cool/ interesting idea and good startup
idea.

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CatDancer
What is missing?

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sysop073
A bookmarklet isn't really a solid business, this is something somebody with a
spare free day would write because they're bored

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Tichy
I find it a little bit annoying if every tiny project is called startup.

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joshsharp
Not to be facetious, but can't you get this by choosing View > Page Style > No
style in Firefox, to remove all stylesheets?

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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.

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thaumaturgy
In Windows 2000 and XP, Control Panel -> Accessibility Options -> Display ->
Use High Contrast.

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carlio
Add this as a bookmark:

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

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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".

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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?

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chrisbroadfoot
Doesn't startup imply business?

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swombat
Indeed.

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

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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...

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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.

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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.

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jodrellblank
<https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html>

I use one of those quite often - I think the "zap" one.

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CatDancer
Cleaned up poor contrast on my test, but no font size change and no feedback
button. Still included all the extraneous confusing content.

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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.

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tzury
I think your idea is great. Though you cannot make a startup out of a button
(some have tried to make a pot of soup out of it see @
[http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street-
Level/dp/05533...](http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street-
Level/dp/0553373412)).

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atestu
Instapaper (<http://instapaper.com>) does that.

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CatDancer
Requires registration. The bookmarklet "saves for later", does not display the
page in a readable form.

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atestu
I know, but you can just save it, and then click on "Text"

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gtani
there's one browser that makes this problematic. Guess which browser that mght
be

<http://21ccw.blogspot.com/2008/04/ie7-page-zoom-broken.html>

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paraschopra
Why don't you simply do it then? Stop discussing here and start doing.

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auston
..or you could just remove styles and increase text size.

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robg
Try ctrl+ in firefox.

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geuis
wow, so many comments to a simple problem.

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