Radio Presenters: Tools for reading stuff from the web on air

So with the ability to surf the web whilst on air in most studios I thought I would share some web-tools you can use which may make reading text from website easier to do whilst on air. Now of course plenty of people will say “well you should edit the text and make it more radio friendly” but sometimes you either can’t be bothered or you run out of time.

So the first tool is called ‘Readability’ and is available here. You setup readability on the site and then create a bookmark for it (it works with safari and firefox, maybe IE) then go to the site you want to read from and when on that site click on your ‘Readability’ bookmark. It takes whichever website you are on at the time and strips out all the distractions such as ads and flash banners and gives you the main text in an easy to read layout.

The second tool is called ‘Autoscroll’ and is available here. Now after you have sent your webpage through Readability. Create a bookmark from the Autoscroll site and click on it and this will start automatically scrolling the webpage for you – just like autocue on the tv. You can control the speed of the scroll etc with the number keys.

It is worth giving them a go and see how you get on. I have found them very useful – Matt