Interesting, but at that size of font used on that webpage I read at half speed and I'm 37. For the hacker news site I can read a full line in 3 focus movements. It's much easier to switch focus to the right than to find the next row in text. Not convinced but YMMV.
The distance the eye moves in each saccade (or short rapid movement) is between 1 and 20 characters with the average being 7–9 characters. Thus, the most impressive fact about fixations (the point at which a saccade jumps to) and saccades is that there is considerable variability not only between readers, but for the same person reading a single passage of text. - [1]
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that would put you at the extreme end of the bell curve; it's more likely you're not aware how much your eye is moving.
I've trained specifically on this by reading thick books of prose like Ulysses,Dhalgren,Gravitys Rainbow etc. where the context is more important than the specific meaning of a sentence, the goal is to try to read faster than I can think, and then parse the information when I have more context. It's also possible to read too fast for any comprehension at all, and then slow down a little and take advantage of speed-blindedness - you'll read faster than you did before.
One thing that slows down a reader is focusing on individual words. Try instead to focus between two words, and use secondary focus to pick out the words next to it without re-focusing.
My own reading of Joyce is mediated through Paddy's Irish, Schubert (Winterreise), and Traviata (Bloom's solo). Music preferably from acoustic recordings.
Seriously, is there a distinction to be made between reading for facts/information (skim, scan, locate, focus) and reading as art (micro scale language and music in the voice, macro scale navigation of the plot)?
Does this distinction translate onto the Web? Is there a literary role for hypertext (pace Mark Bernstein)?
For what it's wortjh, I used to be able to read small fonts comfortably when I was 37. Not that I'm 44, I can't. I read Hacker News with Ctrl-+, and I'm happy that Chrome remembers my zoom setting between visits, or I probably wouldn't have visited very often.
I love that feature from Chrome too. I zoom about 80% of the sites I visit now, and I love how Chrome remembers that preference for some of my most frequented sites.
