Reading speed visualizer

quartertone · Post by **quartertone** » January 19th, 2023, 7:40 pm

Hello LibriVox,

I whipped up a quick tool to help me sloooowww dowwwwn my reading speed.

https://vox.quartertone.net/readspeed

The default text is the "Rainbow Passage", but you can insert your own.

It's a rough cut, and it's kind of janky, but it works for what it's supposed to do. If you've found yourself struggling like I do with maintaining a consistent reading speed that is different than your usual speaking speed, try this out. My unhindered read-aloud speed is about 180-190 WPM, but I'm trying to stay around 150-160 wpm.
I tried to find something online that would do what I wanted, but all search results were for speed reading, and reading faster, go figure. So I made my own. I hope someone else might find it useful.
(You can probably also use this to practice speaking faster, if that's your goal.)

cheers

CalmDragon · Post by **CalmDragon** » January 20th, 2023, 10:55 am

I like it a lot.
Maybe a pause variable for commas and colons too?
Fun.

Post by **philchenevert** » January 21st, 2023, 11:15 am

That is impressive! Please keep on using your obvious skills to suggest things like this that may help other readers here. I tend to read slowly and need to cut out a lot of space between words sometimes.

ChristopherW · Post by **ChristopherW** » January 25th, 2023, 10:20 am

I get a "Forbidden" and "You don't have permission to access this resource." error message when I access the page. Did you take it down?

DyeffersonAz · Post by **DyeffersonAz** » January 25th, 2023, 1:28 pm

ChristopherW wrote: ↑January 25th, 2023, 10:20 am I get a "Forbidden" and "You don't have permission to access this resource." error message when I access the page. Did you take it down?

Me too! I am curious about the link he posted!

quartertone · Post by **quartertone** » January 25th, 2023, 2:20 pm

DyeffersonAz wrote: ↑January 25th, 2023, 1:28 pm
ChristopherW wrote: ↑January 25th, 2023, 10:20 am I get a "Forbidden" and "You don't have permission to access this resource." error message when I access the page. Did you take it down?
Me too! I am curious about the link he posted!

Oops, sorry! File permissions got scrambled when I sync'd my computer with the server. It should be good now.

ChristopherW · Post by **ChristopherW** » January 26th, 2023, 3:39 pm

Nice! Thanks for checking on it.

I do have one suggestion: can you add a way to pause a bit after each comma? I pause about half as long after a comma as I do after a period.

Also, I wonder if it would be helpful to estimate how long each word should be spoken for (basically, more syllables = spoken longer). In the past I developed a speech synthesizer software project, and I found a fairly simple way to automatically convert English (or other language) to phonemes with just a set of rules and pattern matching. See https://www.sr-ix.com/Objects/Story-Teller/technical/T2A/. That could be adapted to produce a spoken length for each word instead. Then you could also remove the "short duration for short words" field as it can calculate word lengths automatically.

quartertone · Post by **quartertone** » January 26th, 2023, 4:13 pm

ChristopherW wrote: ↑January 26th, 2023, 3:39 pm Nice! Thanks for checking on it.

I do have one suggestion: can you add a way to pause a bit after each comma? I pause about half as long after a comma as I do after a period.

Also, I wonder if it would be helpful to estimate how long each word should be spoken for (basically, more syllables = spoken longer). In the past I developed a speech synthesizer software project, and I found a fairly simple way to automatically convert English (or other language) to phonemes with just a set of rules and pattern matching. See https://www.sr-ix.com/Objects/Story-Teller/technical/T2A/. That could be adapted to produce a spoken length for each word instead. Then you could also remove the "short duration for short words" field as it can calculate word lengths automatically.

Oh fascinating! That's actually something I was considering looking into. I'll have to look at your code more thoroughly to see how it could be adapted for Javascript.

The suggestion to include other punctuation was previously given, so I added that feature! Default durations are there, but obviously adjustable.

ChristopherW · Post by **ChristopherW** » January 26th, 2023, 4:42 pm

quartertone wrote: ↑January 26th, 2023, 4:13 pmI'll have to look at your code

Oh, I can't take credit for that code. It was written before I was born.

(Incidentally, the author of that code, John Wasser, hangs around the Arduino forum these days.)

quartertone · Post by **quartertone** » January 28th, 2023, 4:42 pm

Syllable-based timing adjustment option added!
The syllable parsing code is not perfect but it does a pretty good estimation. Of course you can turn this option off if it's not to your liking.

DyeffersonAz · Post by **DyeffersonAz** » January 28th, 2023, 5:53 pm

quartertone wrote: ↑January 19th, 2023, 7:40 pm Hello LibriVox,

I whipped up a quick tool to help me sloooowww dowwwwn my reading speed.

https://quartertone.net/readspeed.html

The default text is the "Rainbow Passage", but you can insert your own.

It's a rough cut, and it's kind of janky, but it works for what it's supposed to do. If you've found yourself struggling like I do with maintaining a consistent reading speed that is different than your usual speaking speed, try this out. My unhindered read-aloud speed is about 180-190 WPM, but I'm trying to stay around 150-160 wpm.
I tried to find something online that would do what I wanted, but all search results were for speed reading, and reading faster, go figure. So I made my own. I hope someone else might find it useful.
(You can probably also use this to practice speaking faster, if that's your goal.)

cheers

Sorry if this is impolite to do. (because I've never asked for it)

Could you release this on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. so that people can contribute to your code?
I could do some pull requests (if the technologies you used are the ones I can work with)!

OBS: This does not mean releasing the source code without restrictions. You can put a license that works according to your intents...

quartertone · Post by **quartertone** » January 28th, 2023, 7:42 pm

DyeffersonAz wrote: ↑January 28th, 2023, 5:53 pm
Sorry if this is impolite to do. (because I've never asked for it)

Could you release this on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. so that people can contribute to your code?
I could do some pull requests (if the technologies you used are the ones I can work with)!

OBS: This does not mean releasing the source code without restrictions. You can put a license that works according to your intents...

I'll look into posting the code somewhere.

Although, it may be a bit much, for something that (for the moment) is just a bit of javascript self-contained in a single web page. If you want to take a look at the code, you can just view-source in your browser. All the code is what you see in that single page. No outside libraries or includes.