Brief
I did some drawings but I'm not uploading any, because I can say what I want in words better than the pictures at this stage. I love the medium.com site. There are no images to distract me. the comments are inline but hidden of the page and the colours aren't complete black and white, which is all great for Dyslexic with attention problems like me!!

I got thinking about other ways that I could help dyslexic/attention deficit people out. I want to be able to cover over all but the couple of lines currently reading. I'd have a similar minimalistic approach to medium but with a sans-serif font. I'd like to log how long a reader can stay on a page and count words per minute, time spent on page without switching tabs. Length of reading session etc... .

I'd be interested in getting some gamification in. I imagine it would be really beneficial to a reader like me if I could see the rewards attached to milestones in the text to help me get to the end of the next paragraph. I used to have a speed reading app on my phone where it would flash up a word at a time and I so I couldn't look away or stop. I think if we had an auto scroll on the reader, with options to adjust the speed that would seriously help me focus!

Concept

you're not getting much from this picture just yet!

I won't be including many of the elements of gamification in the end. Actually just keeping track of two things: Focus time, and words per minute. I notices medium.com had a time for each article, which is great... but it'll take me around twice as long to read an article as most people.
I also love the dictionary feature on my kindle app, you just select a word and it pops up. I will be improving focus time, but as a secondary goal I'd like to encourage comprehension and reading time.

• So Focus Reader will let each user know how long it will take them to read based on their wpm.
• The page will auto scroll at this speed but you can touch the screen at any time to move it manually.
• Keep log of the length of articles and completed and articles aborted to improve predictions of the ideal article length.
• Sort articles based on length so the articles that will increase the users focus time but only by a manageable amount appear at the top. with colour coded icons to let users know that some articles may be too long for them to focus at this stage.
• Split longer articles into manageable 'episodes' so they can read it in installments.
• Provide options to change the background colour, font size, and number of lines displayed at once.
• The only things on the screen other that the text is the estimated time left to complete the article based on their position and wpm time.
• If they select a word the dictionary will come up. To reinforce learning of new words I'd like to remind the user of new words when they are writing a comment to possibly reuse a word. When filtering article categories I'd like to have an option to read articles with new words learned recently.

That seems like a lot of bullet points but I believe this is all the functionality I need to keep the application really simple and not distract my easily distracted audience.

Sketches

I think the moral of the story is that my sketches aren't really communicating much and the sooner I get something in Illustrator the better!

Top Level Framework
This is a simple explanation of the features. There is a simple side menu where you can turn categories on and off and add feeds to a category and then there is a simple settings menu with the really simplified options I mentioned earlier. Each post has a time next to it and is position based on your personal focus time.