Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

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> What kind of speed improvement can I typically expect?

For a typical skilled reader, up to about 25-30%. For people with reading challenges (dyslexia, ADHD, vision impairments), it could be much greater. One fellow with ADHD (and two PhDs) said that he could read about 3x the speed with BeeLine versus regular text.

To get a sense of what the speed difference could be for you, check out our "Reading Challenge". [1] It's not super scientific (you might have more knowledge of one of the topics already, which would bias your results), but it can give you a ballpark figure.

Thanks for pointing out the issue with the research summary link. I'll get that fixed ASAP! There's actually newer research that shows even larger gains for students with reading challenges, as well as data from companies (including a YC company) who saw dramatically lower churn rates and/or higher engagement for users reading with BeeLine in their apps.

1: https://www.beelinereader.com/challenge

I mean I'm hardly an expert on your business but it seems to me like you might want to put that front and center at the very top of your website.

"Read 30 to 300% faster with Beeline."

Cool stuff!

Cool software. I have ADHD and it definitely made reading more comfortable (only 21% faster, but I read a LOT so that's not too surprising.)

Hope it succeeds enough with commercial partners (especially ereaders!) that you can offer the browser extension for free on Chrome someday.

> Hope it succeeds enough with commercial partners (especially ereaders!) that you can offer the browser extension for free on Chrome someday.

This is 100% our plan. As our B2B revenue goes up, we will reduce our B2C pricing, hopefully to $0. We've already released one tool for free, our iOS extension for Safari. [1]

1: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beeline-extension/id1571623734

I found the colours extremely distracting, and the test didn't give any results because I was better/faster without them. You still should give numbers in such a case.

Has there been much scientific research into how much improvement you can get through beeline or other similar tools like bionic reading?

There have been several educational studies about BeeLine, and they've shown various benefits for reading fluency (which is measured as correct WPM) and reading comprehension. These were done with kids as young as six, but mostly older.

There was also a study done in an optometric office with patients, who saw improvements in visual tracking, not surprisingly.

Various of our partners have also tracked to see how user behavior differs between people reading with BeeLine and people reading traditional black text. These have shown increases in article completion rates, average scroll depth, pages per session, and app usage.

All of these studies were done independently and were not compensated. I don't know about bionic — they're pretty new, so I imagine they don't have a ton of research at this time.

I got 27% cool!

Glad to hear it! This thread is super awesome, and it's starting to remind me of our Show HN [1] from back in the day. Love this community!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

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