Bionic Reading®

Really disappointed in the performance of this app. I paid for the premium pro plan (which I have since cancelled) and was very excited to see that they made this app available to individuals. When I went to convert my EPub file it only picked up and converted every 5 words into bionic format, leaving most of the document in regular font. I made sure to play with the settings, turn off and on the types of words… nothing worked. So I decided to convert the EPUB into a .docx file… same thing, did not work. Lastly, I converted that into a .txt file… still did not work and was only converting about every 5th word even with the fixation and saccade turned all the way up. Maybe I was missing an important step? But I am pretty sure I wasn’t. Hopefully, there is some trouble shooting trick I can try. Ultimately, this font/application of this font needs to be built into consumer products (accessibility option within apple/android settings; font option on the Kindle/newspaper apps, etc.), rather than consumer converting the media they want to consume into this font.

A friend brought this app to my attention and I was intrigued by the premise. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just feeling better about reading but that I was actually doing better. I conducted a number of Little experiments to see how much my reading improved. I came to a few conclusions about this app. When reading passages with simple sentence structure where a large majority of the words are three letters or less the app did not improve my reading speed but rather hindered it. it took me 12% longer to read passages then if I had just read it off of a normal page. I also tried increasing the font size. Very diminishing results when I got above font size 26 (not much could fit on the page). however, when I uploaded passages of my students term papers who love to use long words in an effort to trick me into not paying closer attention I discovered this app did an amazing job at improving my reading speed. Calculated a 26% increase with the same amount of retention. I alternated between reading the bionic passage first and then the real text and vice versa just to make sure there wasn’t an effect of me remembering the passage. Overall I conclude that if you are trying to read denser and more “wordy“ passages this app will work just fine for you. If you were uploading children’s books or very simple articles, you may be better off just reading the original text. And if you cannot read fonts smaller than 25, I wouldn’t expect an increase in reading speed but being able to blow up the text is nice.