FocusRead

Focus on the first half of each word to speed up reading. Works on any page.

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.