Textise is a new way of looking at the Web. It’s an Internet tool that removes everything from a web page except for its text.
In practice, this means that images, forms, scripts, pretty fonts, they all go, leaving plain text. What’s really cool, though, is that links are retained, although these are no ordinary links: click one and you’re transported to another text-only page, and that page leads to another, and another, and another… You stay in Textise’s world until you click the “Back To Original Page” link.
Because forms are removed by Textise, you might think that searching isn’t possible. Well, think again – the Textise home page allows you to search using a variety of popular search engines (Bing, Google and Yahoo) and display the results in a text-only format. Plus, Textise can optionally display a search box on some sites (BBC, Metacritric, YouTube and many others – see this blog post for the full list).
Textise has many uses –
- It can improve accessibility for the blind and partially-sighted.
- It creates pages that are better for printing when it’s just the words you’re after.
- It allows safer navigation to suspicious web-sites.
- It can make cluttered pages easier to read.
- It can show you what a search engine sees when it scans a web page – great for SEO!
- It can show you what a screen reader sees when it processes a web page – great for ensuring accessibility!
- It can help with web research.
- It can help web developers add maintenance-free text only links to their web sites. See the For Web Developers page for more details.
If you discover new uses for Textise, please let us know by adding a comment to this page.
Textise works in real time, meaning that it produces a text-only version of the very latest version of a web page. Unlike other solutions, it does not require costly intervention every time the layout of a page is changed.
Note that Textise does have some limitations:
- You can’t use Textise to visit sites that require you to log in, e.g. Facebook.
- You can’t use Textise to buy stuff from e-commerce sites, e.g. Amazon (but you can browse their stores).
Legal
Although there’s evidence that offering text only pages can help to make your web site more accessible, we can’t guarantee that the use of Textise will necessarily bring your site up to your government’s legal accessibility standards.
Terms of Service
We reserve the right to block certain URLs. Reasons for this might be:
– The site is using Textise to offer text-only functionality but does not have permission from us or an active subscription.
– The site contains offensive material, for example sexual, ethical or political.
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