Abstract Reading is an activity needed almost everywhere in daily life. Through reading we are not only able to extract meaning from a text, but also to extend our knowledge of the world and to foster other cognitive abilities. In the age of information technology, reading behav-iour has been subject to change. With more information made accessible through the inter-net and e-reading devices, the time spent reading increases. Further, it is reported that read-ing on computers and other electronic devices tends to be shallower and abilities like browsing over a document to get the gist of its content become more important. In this thesis we want to investigate the usage of text visualizations to facilitate the reading activities on electronic devices, with special focus on reading comprehension. We want to make use of the memory psychological “priming effect” by presenting the reader with a visualization of the text’s content before the actual reading activity, and thus giving the opportunity to get familiar with the information contained in the text prior to reading. To create those visualizations we developed a first prototype, which is capable of extracting keywords of a text and visualizing them. Additionally, we present certain important design aspects of text visualizations, which were discovered through a preliminary study. The presented concepts were evaluated in a user study and are considered as a starting point for future research. With the contributions of this work we aim to support readers with reading activities. Facilitated reading could help to lower the hurdle to read more and therefore foster the gain of knowledge.