What is Safari’s Reader View? It’s a reformatted web page that allows a user to focus on the text on the page without extra photos and ads.
To do this, Safari must look at the page and determine which parts of it a person would want to read. On a page like a Boston.com article, it does a really good job of it. On a page like the SDM Foundation home page, it is much more difficult.
If a user doesn’t know what they are looking at, they could become confused about why the content is nothing like what they expect.
What is Reader View?
First, an example. This is an article on Boston.com. It is not in reader view.
This is the same article in reader view.
This is what our website looks like.
In reader view the SDM Foundation home page looks like this – only displaying pieces of some of our blog posts. Clearly this is not showing a viewer the important pieces of information from our home page!
When the page icon in the top bar is white the page is in Reader view. Click it to turn this view off and on.
How to change the Reader View default
Users can turn reader view on and off on every page as they surf the web. They can also set it by default to be either on or off. Finally, you can turn it on and off for particular websites, but have it set the other way generally.
To change the defaults settings:
- In the Safari Menu, choose Preferences.
- Select the Websites tab.
- At the bottom of the window there is a setting for using reader view on all websites by default.
- At the top of the window is the setting for the particular website that you are currently viewing.
So, you can make sure that websites like ours are not viewed in Reader View, while still allowing websites like Boston.com (websites that are predominantly articles, like news websites and blogs) to default to Reader View, if that is what you prefer.
If you would like help with this process, just call or email and we’ll be happy to assist you! If you have specific questions, or if our terminology isn’t clear, please use our contact form to send us a message. Thank you!