FocusRead

About

FocusRead helps you read the web faster by bolding the first half of each word - an effect sometimes called "bionic reading" - so your eye can skip ahead without losing your place.

It's more than just the bolding. FocusRead ships a full reader toolkit.

WHAT YOU GET

- Bionic bolding on any webpage, with per-site adjustable intensity (25-75%) and minimum word length.
- Smart article detection. The effect is scoped to the actual article body; nav, sidebars, footers and ads stay plain.
- Link-density filter. Skips blocks that are mostly hyperlinks (news feeds, tag clouds).
- Per-site memory. Sliders you tune for Medium remember their Medium settings; Wikipedia gets its own.
- Auto-skip on app-like pages (optional). FocusRead stays quiet on Gmail, dashboards, and anything without a detectable article.
- Focus mode. Dim every paragraph except the one you hover, to anchor your reading.
- Dyslexia toolkit. Line-height, letter-spacing, word-spacing sliders plus an optional Lexend reading font.
- Reader view. Click "Open this page in Reader" for a clean distilled article tab with five contrast tints (Paper / Sepia / Solarized / Dim / Night).
- Text-to-speech in Reader. Hit Play for paragraph-by-paragraph audio with the speaking block highlighted.
- Phrase-chunking speed read. Flash 1-4 word groups at 100-800 WPM, bionic still applied.
- PDF reader. Flip one toggle and every PDF opens in FocusRead's reader with bionic formatting.
- On-device AI summary. Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano generates a TL;DR for any article. Zero API cost, zero data leaving your device.
- Reading analytics. Daily and all-time minutes read plus a words-per-minute estimate. Stored locally only.
- Keyboard shortcut. Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F toggles FocusRead for the current site.

PRIVACY

FocusRead doesn't ship any data off your device. Ever.

- Content scripts read text nodes to bold their prefixes. They do not transmit that text anywhere.
- Your settings sync across signed-in Chrome profiles via Chrome's standard sync. FocusRead does not see or receive them.
- Reading-time analytics live on your machine only, never synced.
- AI summaries use Chrome's on-device Gemini Nano. Article text is processed locally; nothing leaves your computer.
- FocusRead makes no requests to any server operated by the author. No analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no telemetry.

Full source on GitHub: https://github.com/damienjerry/focusread

FREE

Free and open source (MIT) on all browsers. Native desktop and mobile reader apps are separate products.