FocusRead

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.