Skimming

Skimming is a speed-reading technique in which a reader quickly glances through text to get the general idea or gist without reading every word. Sighted readers skim by scanning headlines, bold text, first sentences of paragraphs, and visually prominent content. For blind and visually impaired screen reader users, skimming presents a significant accessibility challenge because audio-based content consumption is inherently sequential — users cannot "glance" at spoken text the way sighted readers scan a page. Research has shown that screen reader users experience information overload because they must listen to content linearly before deciding if it is relevant. Accessible skimming interfaces have been proposed that use extractive text summarization to create shortened versions of articles that preserve the original wording and structure, allowing users to toggle between the summary and full text. Effective non-visual skimming has been shown to be nearly twice as fast as standard screen reading for information-finding tasks without significantly compromising comprehension.