An automatic reading assistance application for documents available in electronic form. Embodiments of the present invention help a reader to quickly find and assimilate information contained in a document. According to an embodiment, the present invention annotates portions of a document which are relevant to user-specified concepts. According to another embodiment, the present invention builds and displays a thumbnail image which displays the contents of the document in a continuous manner. In a specific embodiment, the annotations and the thumbnail image may be displayed using an Internet Explorer browser