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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):

Spritz Example 1

Spritz Example 2

Answers to comments:

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  • 9
    +1 I wasn't aware of this technology. I used to do that with power point slides setting it to have one slide per min or so. Mar 2, 2014 at 17:01
  • Yes: 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 > lafeuille.blog.lemonde.fr/2008/09/10/…). Mar 2, 2014 at 17:20
  • So basically you are looking for something like 7speedreading.com but for free? I couldn't find the price/type of products available though Mar 2, 2014 at 17:26
  • 3
    I think I am going to build this. Looks extremely interesting and should be easy.
    – Paul Muir
    Mar 5, 2014 at 19:51
  • 1
    I've been looking for a free program that does this for a long time. A program I have used in the past is Ace Reader, but it's not free. It does what you want (which is the only feature I've used), and lots more.
    – Moshe Katz
    Mar 6, 2014 at 19:15

4 Answers 4

6

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

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  • 4
    Have you used them? What are your personal experiences? Mar 14, 2014 at 8:50
0

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
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  • 1
    Are you affliated with this product at all? If so, please mention in the post. Do you have any personal experiences? If so, please add them in the post. These can by added by editing the answer :) Jul 9, 2015 at 21:12
0

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!

0

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

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