Speed reading software for Windows

Question

I'm looking for a speed reading software for Windows. I am aware of Spritz for Android, Velocity for iOS and the website Speeder. I am looking for a program having as many following features as possible:

• Changing WPM
• Supporting most document formats: txt, PDF, Word, OOO, etc.
• Choosing which pages/paragraph to read
• Allowing to pause
• Allowing to visualize the entire page + illustrations if any at the same time.
• working on Windows 7
• free

Video of Spritz (contrary to what they somehow imply in the text, they didn't invent this reading method at all):

Answers to comments:

• Eye saccades limit our reading speed. Without it we can drastically improve the reading speed (up to 1600 WPM i.e. 3 to 4 times the usual reading speed, according to scientist Stanislas Dehaene > http://lafeuille.blog.lemonde.fr/2008/09/10/comment-le-numerique-peut-il-augmenter-nos-capacites-de-lecture/)
• http://7speedreading.com is advertised as being a software to learn good reading habits. It doesn't seem to be about displaying the text in such a way that reading speed is optimized.

Answer 1

You could try OpenSpritz. It's based on Spritz and is a bookmarklet and runs in your browser. It is quite limited but should suffice for light reading.

Pros:

• Provides a clean overlay to read from
• Offers a range of different reading speeds ranging from 200WPM - 950WPM
• You can choose which sections of the page to read

Cons:

• Only works on plain text pages, documents like .pdf or .doc aren't read
• Has no pause feature

There is also Squirt, another bookmarklet which does everything OpenSpritz does but slightly cleaner and better and also allows pausing

Answer 2

WordFlashReader is simple and the best in my opinion.

Features:

• completely free
• portable
• works in fullscreen with adjustable colors for background and text
• lots of shortcut keys for increasing/decreasing speed, etc.
• flashing speed range 34 WPM to 447 WPM
• adjustable pauses after specified words/punctuation
• no ads, clean and easy interface, no-nonsense
• works with .txt, .html and .PDF

Answer 3

I think Balabolka, a free app with a multitude of uses would be useful to you.

According to the website:

"Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka. The on-screen text can be saved as a WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA file. The program can read the clipboard content, view the text from AZW, AZW3, CHM, DjVu, DOC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PRC, PDF and RTF files, customize font and background colour, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys.Balabolka is a Russian word, it can be translated as "chatterer"

Coming to the point:

The software has an option of spritz reader in the Tools menu. That has all the options you wanted. Best of luck enjoying it!

Answer 4

There is a speedreading package for Emacs that works on any text that can be opened in Emacs called Spray

It's also available in Spacemacs: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/tree/master/layers/%2Btools/speed-reading