BBC Working With US Startup on Smartphone Speed-Reading Techniques

The BBC is working with American startup Spritz to experiment with “how science and speed-reading technologies” can help consumers better cope with the inundation of emails, text messages and online news stories, blogged Cyrus Saihan, BBC head of digital partnerships, Friday. “The average UK adult now spends more time online and consuming media each day than they do sleeping,” said Saihan. “We wanted to see what new technologies could be applied to make this overload of information easier for our audiences to manage.” The standard way of reading text is “moving your eyes across a page as you read each sentence from left to right,” he said. “It is thought that the eye movement required when you move your eyes across a line in a sentence can take up as much as 80% of your time spent reading.” In the BBC experiment with Spritz, each word shown on a screen “has one letter that is highlighted red, to draw your attention to that point in the word,” he said. “That letter is the optimal recognition point in the word and helps your brain quickly process the word, with as little eye movement as possible.” Consumers are “reading more and more on mobile phones, but the screen sizes and text sizes of mobiles are smaller than what we have traditionally been used to with books and magazines,” said Saihan. “Technologies such as this therefore have the potential to make it much easier for us to read on mobile phones. This way of reading could also possibly be useful on devices such as smart watches, which have even smaller screen sizes.”