Introducing Bionic Text

[Houston, 05.20.2025] — As part of Open Horizons’ mission to offer innovative, effective, and accessible learning materials, the Open Horizons team has developed a series of tools integrated within its resources to improve the overall user experience. We are excited to announce bionic text as one of these tools, and we believe that its implementation will benefit learners of all kinds.  

It's worth asking the question ‘what is bionic text’? After all, Open Horizons is one of the first online learning platforms to incorporate such a feature. In short, bionic text is a typographic feature that highlights certain words within a text. It is common to feel overwhelmed by educational material, especially if learning through lengthy textbooks or wordy online courses isn’t your strong suit. What some people don’t realize is that knowledge acquisition often doesn’t require more than just a few key words!  

In some cases, it doesn’t even have to be words but rather syllables or letters that help guide the eyes naturally without losing the meaning of the original sentence(s). By streamlining more complex resources, our bionic text feature aims to improve comprehension and alleviate cognitive load, especially among neurodivergent individuals, visual learners, and other people whose learning styles aren’t adequately reflected in most educational settings. Here is an example of a sentence without bionic text: 

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell 

Here is the same sentence but with bionic text: 

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell 

Perhaps you read and understood the second sentence faster than the first. Even if that wasn’t the case, the effect of bionic text tends to become more pronounced in longer pieces of text, so we would encourage everyone to try out this new feature. It can be especially helpful when trying to learn a lot of information in a short window (ex. cramming)! In the future, we intend to further personalize the bionic text feature to cater to individuals’ own preferred reading habits. We hope this advanced tool is of use to many users, and we are open to constructive feedback on this Open Horizons feature!