Hoverlight — Cordi Y

Rest your mouse on a sentence and the whole sentence lights up.

Hoverlight is a reading guide for people who lose their place on the page: readers with dyslexia or ADHD, people reading in a second language, or anyone whose eyes keep slipping to the wrong line on a long article.

It works like the coloured overlay strip some readers keep on their desk, with one difference. A paper strip, like most on-screen reading rulers, only knows about lines. Hoverlight follows sentences, so when a sentence starts in the middle of one line and ends on the next, all of it stays lit.

There is no overlay and no separate reader view. You read the page as it is, links stay clickable, and nothing shifts.

Features

• Hover over any sentence to highlight it. No clicking.
• Six soft colours, or pick any colour you like.
• Adjustable strength, from a faint tint to a bold band.
• Context: also light the one or two sentences before and after, in a softer shade.
• Works across bold text, links and line breaks.
• Understands sentence endings in many languages.
• Leaves text boxes alone, so it never gets in the way of typing.
• Pause it on any website with one click.
• Keyboard shortcut to switch it on and off: Option+Shift+H on Mac, Alt+Shift+H on Windows and Linux.

Where it works

• Most web pages: articles, news, Wikipedia, documentation, online textbooks and course pages.
• Firefox 140 or later on Mac, Windows and Linux.

Where it doesn't work yet

• PDFs opened in Firefox's built-in PDF viewer (browsers don't allow extensions there).
• Google Docs while editing, and other editors that draw text on a canvas.
• Firefox for Android.

Privacy

Hoverlight does not collect, store or send any data. It has no analytics, no accounts and makes no network requests. Only your settings are saved, in your browser.

Hoverlight is free and open source.
Live demo: https://cordi919.github.io/hoverlight/
Source code: https://github.com/cordi919/hoverlight