Text Skimming

A reading strategy where a person quickly reviews a document to get an overview of its content, identify key points, and locate specific information without reading every word. Sighted readers skim using visual cues like headings, bold text, paragraph breaks, and spatial layout. For blind screen reader users, skimming is significantly more difficult because content is presented linearly as audio, making it hard to skip ahead or identify structural cues without proper semantic markup. Assistive technologies attempt to support skimming through heading navigation shortcuts, link lists, and landmark regions, but these strategies depend on content being properly structured. Research into automatic text summarization and topic segmentation aims to provide screen reader users with skimming capabilities comparable to those of sighted readers.