Bits and Bytes
THE ANSWER GUY
Reader Mode by KEVIN MCISAAC
Back in the dark ages when the world wide web (remember when we used to call it that) was young there were very limited ways to modify the appearance of a web page. HTML at the time included a few things such as the <blink> tag to make text within the tag blink. This was widely considered a “bad thing” after giving it a bit of thought. Flashing text on a web page is annoying and distracting. The <blink> tag was deprecated and most modern browsers will ignore it if it is in the code. Flash forward to 2021 and the ratio of useful information on a web page to stuff that’s annoying and distracting is far worse. Most of us would be thrilled to just have the <blink> tag back if it meant getting rid of the myriad of banner ads, video ads, text pullouts, etc. that all distract from us just trying to read what the author of the web page wanted to share with us. Welcome to Reader Mode. If you’d like to just read the web page you’re on Reader Mode is what you’re looking for. Next time you open a web page on your iPhone or iPad with the Safari browser take a look a the top left-hand corner.You should see a little ‘A’ next to a big ‘A’ icon. Press the icon and either the page will immediately switch to Reader View or a drop-down menu should appear. At the top may be an option for Reader View. If the option is disabled then Safari cannot convert the page. Pressing the AA icon again will disable Reader Mode.
that Reader Mode works for them too. Users of Google Chrome will be less delighted. Users of Chrome Android can get a simplified view, but it may not be available by default. To enable it: 1. Launch Chrome for Android. 2. Tap on the vertical 3dots icon for options.
What Reader Mode does is strip away everything that’s not considered part of the article. It removes any text formatting and gives you the Sergeant Joe Friday version of the web page: “Just the facts, Ma’am.” the page using sensible tags to distinguish sections of the web page, but it does work remarkably well a lot of the time. To go one step further, if you have a website you use regularly and you always want the Reader Mode you can configure this using the same drop-down menu from the double AA icon.
What Reader Mode does is strip away everything that’s not considered part of the article. It removes any text formatting and gives you the Sergeant Joe Friday version of the web page: “Just the facts, Ma’am.”
Go to the website. Press the AA icon and in the drop-down menu look for Website Settings. Click that and a Settings page will appear which lets you choose Use Reader Automatically. Once set Reader Mode will always be on for the website you are currently on.
It’s not foolproof, as it does depend on the web developer properly developing
Users of Microsoft Edge and Firefox on their phones will be delighted to discover
3. Select the Settings menu from the available list. 4. Scroll down and tap on the Accessibility menu. 5. Enable the check box against the Simplified view for web pages. Now when you open any website or news article in Chrome for Android you can tap on the bar at the bottom saying show simplified view. One last tip for iPhone/iPad Safari users. The same AA menu has another nice feature: quick font size adjustment. Web page developers tend to be on the younger side with young eyes. They tend to want to squeeze more information rather than less on a web page. The combination of those two things means often web pages have tiny text.You can use the AA menu to expose two buttons on the top left and right of the settings menu. There is a small A and a big A. Clicking the big A will instantly increase the text size on the web page. Clicking the small A will decrease it. This can be very helpful if you’re trying to read a recipe off your phone in Save On and don’t have your reading glasses. Or so I’ve been told. Happy Computing. FERNIEFIX.COM
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