Plainsight: Dyslexia Font, Reading Ruler, Colour Overlay & Dark Mode

Plainsight makes any website easier to read. Change the font, open up the spacing, tint the page, follow your line with a reading ruler, strip away the clutter, or have the whole thing read aloud. Built for people with dyslexia, ADHD, low vision, migraine, visual stress and Irlen syndrome — and for anyone who finds the web harder to read than it needs to be. Free. No account. No ads. No trial that expires. Nothing is paywalled, because nobody should have to pay to read a web page. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHAT YOU GET Dyslexia-friendly fonts Switch any website to OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Verdana, Georgia or Comic Sans. All fonts are bundled inside the extension, so pages load instantly and no font server ever sees your browsing. Letter spacing, word spacing and line height The controls that actually move the needle. Open up the space between letters and words, raise the line height, add room between paragraphs, and cap the line length so your eye never loses its place. This is the best-evidenced part of the extension and it is switched on by default. Reading ruler and reading guide Three kinds. A translucent band that follows your cursor, a thin line that underlines the row you're on, and a spotlight that dims everything except your current line. Adjust the height, colour, opacity and dimming. Prefer not to use a mouse? Switch on keyboard mode and drive the ruler with the arrow keys. Colour overlays and screen tint Eight overlay colours — yellow, rose, aqua, mint, blue, violet, grey, or any custom colour — with adjustable strength. The digital equivalent of a coloured reading sheet, for glare, light sensitivity and visual stress. Real dark mode Nine page themes including cream, sepia, mist, mint, rose, slate, dark and high contrast, plus a custom colour picker. Dark mode ships with two engines: Smart recolours the page properly, and Invert is the blunt fallback for stubborn sites that fight back, flipping media back so photos still look like photos. Reader mode One keystroke strips any article down to clean text — no sidebars, no popups, no related-content grids — and applies your typography settings to it. Includes an estimated reading time. Read aloud Listen to any page or any selection, with word-by-word highlighting inside reader mode. Adjustable speed, pitch and voice. It uses your browser's own speech voices, so it works offline, costs nothing, and no text is ever uploaded anywhere. Bionic-style reading Bold the first part of every word to help your eye anchor to each one. Adjustable strength. Syllable breaks Split long words into syllables — beau·ti·ful — for anyone sounding words out, including readers learning English. Distraction removal for focus and ADHD Hide sidebars, comments, promos, newsletter popups, social share bars and related-content blocks. Hide images and video entirely. Stop animation, carousels and autoplay dead. Low vision support Scale text up to 2.2×, boost font weight, force maximum contrast, emphasise links and headings, and switch on a large or extra-large high-visibility cursor. Double-click dictionary Double-click any word for its definition, with a button to hear it pronounced. Off by default, and it asks permission before it ever connects to anything. Per-site settings — the one nobody else does properly Give any website its own configuration. Cream paper and a reading ruler on news articles, untouched on your email, high contrast on your course site. Switch the popup to "This site" and your changes apply there only. Reading profiles Seven one-click starting points that configure a dozen settings at once: Dyslexia, ADHD Focus, Low Vision, Migraine & Light Sensitivity, Visual Stress / Irlen, Language Learner, and Night Reading. Every value stays adjustable afterwards. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHO IT'S FOR Dyslexia. Open spacing, short lines, warm paper, a ruler to hold your place, and read-aloud for the long pages. ADHD and focus difficulties. A spotlight that follows your line, with everything that moves or competes for attention removed from the page. Low vision and partial sight. Large, heavy text at maximum contrast, with a cursor that is easy to find. Migraine, photophobia and light sensitivity. No pure white anywhere, low brightness, a grey wash to take the edge off glare, and all animation stopped. Visual stress and Irlen syndrome. Coloured overlays over a soft background, with a reading ruler to steady the line. Learning English or reading a second language. Roomy text, syllable breaks, and double-click definitions. Students, teachers and SEN staff. Works on any website, any course platform, any online reading list. Nothing to buy, nothing to license, no accounts to manage for a class. Anyone reading at night. A proper dark mode, not an inverted page. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ AN HONEST NOTE ABOUT THE RESEARCH Most reading extensions sell dyslexia fonts as a treatment. The evidence does not support that, and you deserve to know it. Controlled studies have repeatedly found that OpenDyslexic does not improve reading speed or accuracy compared with ordinary fonts like Arial or Verdana. What does hold up is increased letter and word spacing, shorter line length, reduced contrast, and text-to-speech. So Plainsight ships the fonts — because plenty of people genuinely prefer them, and preference is a real reason to use something — but it makes the evidence-backed settings the defaults. The settings page lays out what the research shows for every feature, including the ones where the evidence is weak or absent, with the studies named. This isn't a disclaimer buried in a footer. It's on the settings page, in plain language, because an accessibility tool that oversells itself isn't doing you a favour. None of this is medical advice. If reading is a persistent struggle, an assessment from a specialist teacher, optometrist or educational psychologist will tell you far more than any browser …