It's a little late - sorry - but it's time for our monthly update. Here's what we rolled out in May!

New account management

We rejigged our account management system, both behind the scenes and in our app, to make account management easier. You can now change your account owner more easily, manage your settings more easily, add users more easily, and so on. This change includes a set of things we have had on our list for a long time, and we know plenty of you have been waiting patiently for this update, so thank you!

Custom dictionaries

Our spellchecked highlights words it doesn't recognize, as you would expect. However, that inevitably will include things it probably shouldn't flag as errors - your brand name, for one example, or some industry-specific terminology. We have just finished the development of a system to resolve this problem. Now, when you move your mouse over a spelling mistake, you can tell the site to ignore it in the future. You can manage your custom dictionary from your account settings, and you can specify whether or not a word should be case-sensitive (useful for brand names).

New suggested replacements

One of the things we have found frustrating is that, while it is really nice to be able to see long words where they are being used, it would be nice if the tool suggested replacements which are easier to read. Well, good news - now we do! When the site finds a long word in your text and you move the mouse over it, we suggest replacement words which may be useful. Our replacement database is still a work-in-progress, but within a couple of months, we expect to have a more comprehensive set of replacements.

Changes to free usage

We have tried a few different approaches to free usage in the past, with varying results. We want Readable to be free to people who only need it occasionally, without making it free for everyone all the time. Our latest update will allow you to score as much text as you like for basic readability, but will only provide useful feedback and highlighting for the first part of your documents.

Free trials!

While changing our free usage, we have also rolled out free trials for ContentPro subscribers. With a 7-day free trial, you have plenty of time to see if a ReadablePro subscription is useful to you, and to dive into the finer points of readability analysis.

Product tour

There is a lot to see in our text interface, and some of it isn't terribly intuitive. We're working on a design update to address some of the issues we have with that, but in the meantime, we've also rolled out a product tour for the text tool, which will guide you through the interface and explain what you can find and where. 

Dave Child

Dave is the founder of Readable and has been building websites since the early 90s. He’s one of those fortunate people who gets to do what he loves for a living.