A Visualization Bookmarklet for Assessing the Readability of Texts on the Web

Readability is an important goal of texts on the web. Manual inspection of readability can be time consuming. Several readability indices have been proposed but their calculations often require text to be copied into specific tools. We therefore developed a bookmarklet which allows the readability of websites to be visualized directly in the browser. The background of different passages of text is marked according to their readability with heat-map colors, using established readability indices. Frequent words and difficult words are marked with colors.