Highlight Reader — Read Aloud, Highlight on the Page

Description

Reads any web page aloud and highlights each sentence on the page as it goes. Free voices, no account, nothing leaves your browser. Reads any web page aloud and keeps the highlight on the page — not in a side panel. WHAT IT DOES • Select some text and click the toolbar icon, and it reads from there. Right-click gives you "Read aloud from here" as well. There is also a keyboard shortcut, Alt+Shift+R by default — Chrome does not always assign it, so if nothing happens you can set it yourself at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. • The sentence being read is highlighted on the page itself, so your eyes and ears stay in the same place. The page scrolls along when the next sentence is out of view. • Speed, voice and highlight colour are one click away in the popup. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO • No account, no sign-up, no analytics, and this extension has no server of its own. It speaks with the voices Chrome already offers you. Chrome groups those into on-device voices, which never leave your computer, and network voices (they have "Google" in the name), which are synthesised by their provider — choosing one means Chrome sends the text being read to that provider. The voice list says which is which, and the extension tells you when a network voice is selected. • It installs without access to your websites. It only touches the tab you are on, at the moment you ask it to read, and only to find the text, draw the highlight and scroll it into view. It never changes the page's text, and it adds no content of its own. WORD-BY-WORD HIGHLIGHT (PRE-ORDER) The voices are free and stay free — including Chrome's network voices, which already sound natural. What is planned as a paid add-on is word-level highlighting together with a natural voice: the voices Chrome hands an extension report only the start and end of each utterance, so this version moves the highlight a sentence at a time. Cloud voices report every word. One payment of $4.99 would cover 12 months of word-level highlighting, no pause between sentences, and more languages; no automatic renewal, and a full refund at any time before it ships. No date is promised. Early users get it free: install before 30 September 2026 and leave your email on our site, and your first 12 months are on us when it ships — nothing else is asked. The buttons in the popup open our website; nothing is charged from inside the extension. WHAT IT CANNOT READ Text inside an iframe (embedded posts, some comment widgets) and text inside web components that use a shadow DOM is not picked up. Chrome's own pages and the Web Store cannot be read at all — that is a browser rule, not a choice. PRIVACY This extension collects nothing and sends nothing anywhere itself. Your settings (speed, voice, colour) are kept in Chrome's own sync storage. There is no backend and no third-party code. The one exception is named above and is yours to make: picking a network voice means Chrome sends that text to the voice provider.

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