Spotlight Reading

Drag a light band down any page and read one line at a time. Everything outside it fades back. Free, no account, no tracking.

Spotlight Reading puts a soft band over the lines you are reading. Everything outside it does not get hidden or blurred — its contrast falls away on a gradient, so the page still reads as a page, it just stops pulling at you. It is the old trick of sliding a card down a textbook, done as software. HOW IT WORKS • Click the toolbar icon, or press Alt+S, on any article • Drag the band, or tap a sentence to jump straight to it • Press F and it follows your mouse, snapping to whole sentences and paragraphs • Press 1–7 to change the tint; shift-click a dot to stack up to three tints at once • It remembers light pages and dark pages separately • Press Esc, or click the icon again, to take it off WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account. No sign-up. No analytics, no tracking, no data collection of any kind. It makes no network requests at all — everything is drawn locally in your browser. The extension asks only for activeTab, which means it can act on a page only after you click the button on that page. BEING STRAIGHT WITH YOU Coloured overlays have a long history of overclaiming. Controlled studies have not found reliable gains in reading speed or comprehension, and this extension makes no medical claims and does not claim to improve any condition. What it offers is one thing: reading that feels a little less tiring. There is a fuller version on the web — paste a link and it fetches the article, open a PDF or EPUB, adjust the typography — at https://spotlightreading.com