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Startup idea for you: A button to make websites readable
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
- MrUnderbridge 18y ago"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.
- robg 18y agoTry ctrl+ in firefox.
- carlio 18y agoAdd 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.
- CatDancer 18y agoAn 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".
- carlio 18y agoOk 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?
- joshsharp 18y agoNot to be facetious, but can't you get this by choosing View > Page Style > No style in Firefox, to remove all stylesheets?
- twism 18y ago... or Ctrl + Alt + s with the developer toolbar addon in firefox.
- CatDancer 18y agoSure, 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.
- thaumaturgy 18y agoIn Windows 2000 and XP, Control Panel -> Accessibility Options -> Display -> Use High Contrast.
- slackbp 18y agoView-Style-User Mode in Opera 9.5 (or Alt-v-s-u).
- brm 18y agoThere is a huge difference between cool/ interesting idea and good startup idea.
- chrisbroadfoot 18y agoDoesn't startup imply business?
- swombat 18y agoIndeed. There is no business in this idea. It's a nice hack to work on in your spare time one afternoon.
- gtani 18y agothere's one browser that makes this problematic. Guess which browser that mght be http://21ccw.blogspot.com/2008/04/ie7-page-zoom-broken.html http://21ccw.blogspot.com/2008/04/ie7-page-zoom-broken.html
- atestu 18y agoInstapaper (http://instapaper.com http://instapaper.com) does that.
- jodrellblank 18y agohttps://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html I use one of those quite often - I think the "zap" one.
- CatDancer 18y agoCleaned up poor contrast on my test, but no font size change and no feedback button. Still included all the extraneous confusing content.
- orib 18y agoThis 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...
- sysop073 18y agoSites can be designed semantically and thus easily themed (e.g. http://www.csszengarden.com/ http://www.csszengarden.com/ lets you apply totally different themes easily), but most sites are designed poorly
- orib 18y agoNo, What I want isn't possible with CSS adding turing-completeness to CSS, or using massive javascript hacks, and special-casing every browser out there. And even then, you'd end up with inconsistent behavior across websites. I want to be able to -- for example -- on my blackberry, just drop the navigation into a button that I click on to show the links. I want the titlebar of a site to drop all the images -- don't even download them. Data is expensive in Canada. I want to have the list of subscribers turn into a simple link to a new page, and only display the body of the article I'm reading. Anything else can be hidden in a menu in the browser (file->navigation->list of links, perhaps?) And most importantly, I want to configure this on my end. I don't want to be constrained to the web designer's lame ideas about layout
- auston 18y ago..or you could just remove styles and increase text size.
- Tichy 18y agoI find it a little bit annoying if every tiny project is called startup.
- tzury 18y agoI 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/0553373412 http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street-Level/dp/05533...).
- geuis 18y agowow, so many comments to a simple problem. File->Print preview
- paraschopra 18y agoWhy don't you simply do it then? Stop discussing here and start doing.