Reading Speed Visualizer

Target WPM:

Add pauses after punctuation, in milliseconds:

(Set to zero for default pause)
After period:
After comma:
After semicolon:
After colon:

Adjust for syllables:

Increase duration of word by % per syllable after or more syllables.

Short duration for articles and such:

% of default
Includes: a, an, as, at, if, it, in, the
(Set to 1 for default duration.)

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon.
There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Throughout the centuries people have explained the rainbow in various ways. Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation. To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal floods. The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. The Norsemen considered the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from earth to their home in the sky.
Others have tried to explain the phenomenon physically. Aristotle thought that the rainbow was caused by reflection of the sun's rays by the rain. Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection, but refraction by the raindrops which causes the rainbows.
Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. The difference in the rainbow depends considerably upon the size of the drops, and the width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases. The actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of super-imposition of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red and green light when mixed form yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow, with little or no green or blue.

Hello, LibriVox!
This is a little reading-speed visualizer I made for myself. When recording, I have a tendency to read a little too fast for what I opine to be optimal for listening comfort. Sometimes I consciously start at my slower-than-normal pace, but after a while I just speed up and then wonder why my tongue is tripping over words.

I made this tool to help me practice my speaking/reading speed. I tried to find a similar tool online, but all the "reading speed" searches only yielded websites that wanted to help you read faster. What's with the obsession about speed? Slow down and enjoy the ride.

Discussion post on the LibriVox forum.

Privacy notice: This tool does all its processing with javascript, so you can rest assured that no data that you enter here will leave your device. Also, there are no trackers or cookies or analytics on this site.

Known issues

Does not scroll automatically for long content. But this was not intended for long content.
Uses fixed-div overlay to highlight the words, so scrolling or resizing the page will cause the highlight to appear briefly in the wrong place.
I tried to smooth out the movement of the highlight box with CSS animation, but it's still a bit janky.
Preparation of the text involves wrapping every "word" (space-delimited) item in a span, so very long content (longer than 2000 characters) may take a while.
Newlines/paragraphs in the source text are ignored.
Changed font to sans-serif for better readability

Changelog

2023-01-19

First release

2023-01-26

Added delay option for other punctuation

2023-01-28

Syllable adjustment option
Changed fractional value options to percentages
Added enable/disable checkboxes for each option set

2023-01-31

Word count added