OKF Studio v0.9.0

The reader's Aa control has owned reading comfort since it shipped: size, measure, leading, font, reading aids. This release gives it a second half, reading pace. Two modes, one engine, and neither starts on its own.

A minor, not a patch. A new mode with its own keyboard map, a reader header that no longer looks the way it did, and a set of deliberate refusals a reader should meet in release notes rather than mid-sentence.

Speed reading

Focus clears the screen and shows one word at a time. Each word is positioned so the letter your eye recognizes it by, slightly left of centre and further right the longer the word, sits at the same horizontal position in every frame. Removing the jumps between words is the whole mechanism, so the word itself must never drift: a story measures the pivot's centre across sixty frames and several sentence boundaries and asserts it does not move.

Guided leaves the concept where it is and sweeps a marker through the real text.

Start either from the new Speed read action in the reader header, or press S. Inside the player, space plays and pauses, the arrows move, + and - change pace, and Esc leaves. Closing the focus player scrolls the prose to the block you reached, so the mode hands back a position rather than a scroll to the top.

Rereading is inside the mode, not outside it

Serial presentation removes a real cost, and it removes something you need along with it. A large share of eye movements in ordinary reading go backwards, and most of those regressions exist to repair a sentence parsed wrongly the first time. Reviews of the evidence (Rayner et al., So Much to Read, So Little Time) attribute the measured comprehension deficit of one-word-at-a-time presentation to exactly that: a forward-only player takes the repair mechanism away with the wasted travel.

Studio does not promise the deficit away. It puts the repair back:

• The sentence you are on stays printed beneath the frame, whole and legible.
• The arrows step a word (left/right) and a sentence (up/down), and each pauses the player. A deliberate move backwards should not be racing a clock.
• Resuming rewinds a few words rather than restarting where your attention lapsed.

What the player refuses to do

Shred a block that means nothing as words. A table, a fenced code block, an equation, or a diagram makes the player stop, render the block as itself, and wait. Sentence jumps stop there too. The stop is fully keyboard-operable, because it is the point where the player hands control back: focus moves to Continue reading, and the block is a named focusable scroll region, so a long code fence can be read to the bottom with the arrows.

Hide what speed costs. The rate defaults to 300 wpm and ranges from 100 to 800. Comprehension generally holds through roughly 400 to 600 wpm and falls away above that band, so past 500 the player says so in a quiet line rather than letting the number climb silently. The rate stays yours to choose.

Claim the word-start cue makes you faster. The optional emphasis on each word's opening letters ships off and makes no speed claim. A 2024 replication and a 2,000-reader field test found no reading-speed or comprehension effect for typical readers; the signal is more consistent among ADHD and dyslexic readers, and some people simply find it easier to look at, so it is offered as comfort and labelled as comfort.

Keep running. Auto-advancing text is auto-updating content under WCAG 2.2.2, so no pacing mode is persisted (the rate, frame size, and cue are), opening another concept ends the session, pause is always one press away, Reduce motion opens the player paused and never animates between frames, and the ticking frame is hidden from assistive technology while the prose itself never is.

The reader header is regrouped

Speed read and Aa now sit together as reading controls, Work with agent stays in view, and Move and Retire move into a More concept actions overflow at the right edge. Five peer buttons in one row is past the point where a toolbar is scanned rather than read. An overflow costs discoverability, which is what decided which two: both are infrequent maintenance that open a dialog rather than acting on click. Cancelling either still returns focus to the control that opened it.

Also

• Agent turns stream in smoothly instead of arriving in blocks.
• Transcript text can be selected and copied.
• Fixes: the pace sliders were 16px hit targets, under the 24px floor; two shipped strings carried em dashes.

Upgrading

Nothing to migrate. No change to the bundle format, to retrieval, or to ACP wire behaviour. Speed reading does nothing until you start it, and it never arms itself for the next concept.

Installers for Windows (.msi, .exe) and Linux (.deb, .AppImage) are attached below, each with its update signature. There is no macOS build; the release matrix has never included one.