• Saturday January 28th 2012
• Do you want fries with that project?

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firereader

resources:	Home Mailing List Installation Source Code Members Bugs Screenshots

Have a look at these pages to see which direction we're heading:
Screenplay Mission 1
Screenplay Mission 2
And a video about Andy's (one of our developers) investigations

FireReader is a Speed Reading Extension for Firefox.

Installation:

• We now have a working xpi! Have a look at it on the Installation page

Usage:

• User selects text
• User selects Tools -> FireRead
• FireReader hightlights the selected text in word groups

Here's how it works:

• Get user selection via window._content.getSelection().
• Find root node of selection (smallest common ancestor).
• Create an array of node's using the treewalker provided by document.createTreeWalker to iterate over the root node's children.
• Split (node.splitText) every node of the array above into subnodes each containing one word.
• Find x- and y-coordinates of every word by temporarily replacing it with a span object and finding the span objects coordinates (Using the word-subnodes unfortunately doesn't work).
• Iterate over the words and group them.
• Unhighlight the previous word group and highlight the current word group by removing/adding a span around them.

FireReader is still alpha, if you are a developer and want to help, here is what could be improved:

• FireReader reads more than selection (ATM looks for the root node of the selection and highlights all text in that root node)
• Some things are hard-coded (Speed, words per line, Colours, ...), they should get a menu.
• It would be even nicer to have a control panel with buttons for play/pause, increase/decrease speed, one sentence forward/backward
• Code is ugly!!! This is my first Javascript program so any suggestions are welcome!!

If you are interested in this project and want to join the development, drop me a line using the address firereader-owner@mozdev.mozdev.org