site reader mode toggling

I need to be able to write for multiple audiences. Among them are academics, professional colleagues, clients (potential and otherwise), journalists, and general-interest readers – though I am focusing on the first three initially.

These audiences have different needs. Academics want to see citations, references, and footnotes. Clients don’t. Professional colleagues use different vocabulary than both academics and clients and have different interests in references and footnotes. Phrasing is sometimes different for different audiences. Which example to use for illustrating a point can also be reader-dependent.

I want my readers to be able to choose which mode they are in as they are reading. Having them log in and asking them to configure a profile is too inconvenient – most just won’t do it. I want them to be in immediate control instead of going into some technical contortion.

I have found close to what I need in the Collapse-O-Matic plugin but it works on a <div> level and seems unable to operate at the granularity needed here. Their “Expand / Collapse All Grouped” functionality:

<span class="expandall" rel="fiction">Expand All</span>
<span class="collapseall" rel="fiction">Collapse All</span>

(with some dressed up toggle capacity) would do the trick if the content could be inline. Though I am no HTML/JS/JQuery expert, I’m guessing <span> is the needed markup. Don’t quote me.

The reader interface would be simple: one or more mode toggles that would hide or show the different versions of the post/page. Maybe those toggles could unobtrusively follow the reader down the page so they could easily flip from one mode to another? The writing would be simple as well: an ability to designate (via shortcode I guess) in which mode or modes the content would be visible. The default, obviously, would be that the content is visible in all modes when there is no markup.

Any suggestions on how I go about getting this facility? Anyone heard of a plugin that could do this or part of it? I know I could code it myself, it’s just that I have never created a WordPress plugin and have no idea how long it would take me (probably years).

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.