sentence-stepper lets you read websites one sentence at a time, at your own speed. it has multiple highlight styles to address people's diverse needs

in just two days we are already at 500 users and growing! i'm taking into account all your suggestions to keep improving the tool

➡️ Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addon/sentence-stepper/

➡️ Chrome:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sentence-stepper/cfiappnihemjkaaepefjfofagcobikek

❤️☕️ Support development:

https://ko-fi.com/Z8Z61KT5MM

(Positive reviews and sharing to other platforms are other great ways to support the addon's growth!)

⚙️ Open Source code:

https://github.com/CarlaCGDM/sentence-stepper

[ID. Two gifs of the accessibility tool in action. They highlight one sentence at a time for ease of readability.

The first gif shows the tool cycling down the paragraphs, from sentence to sentence, in a thick yellow highlight.

The second gif shows the different highlight styles such as; a thick yellow, a thinner yellow, no highlight at all, a gradient highlight, blocky tri-color highlight by line, and colored text by line. End ID.]

(Thank you @wistoreal for the ID.)

See progress on y'alls requests and suggestions below:

hi anon thank you for reaching out! i'm working on the page on the firefox and chrome storefronts for the next update. in the meantime here's the step by step i follow to install it and use it, i hope it works for you! i think the general steps are the same for all extensions 1. go to addon page: https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addon/sentence-stepper/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org 2. click big "add to firefox" button (sorry that my page is in spanish, it's the big blue button)

[ID: screenshot of the addon page in the link with an arrow pointing to the "add to firefox" button, in spanish language. END ID] 3. click "accept" on all dialogs and check boxes according to your preference. i reccommend checking the "pin to toolbar" option (it's pinned by default) so you can always access the addon's features with just one click

[ID: cropped screenshot showing a dialog in spanish that says: "sentence stepper has been added", alongside a checkbox to pin the extension to the firefox toolbar, which is checked in. END ID] 4. go to a different site to test the addon on since the addons page doesnt let addons run on itself here's a book from Project Gutenberg that you can use for testing: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10007/10007-h/10007-h.htm#pref01

5. click the icon button on the toolbar! i know the icon is terrible i will update it in the next update. in any case you should see the sentence-stepper toolbar appear, and the text around the first sentence dim!

[ID: a screenshot of the above step followed by a closeup of the spot where the addon button is located] 6. from here on you can use the "prev" and "next" buttons on the toolbar to move through the text or ALT + <- and -> on your keyboard. Reloading the page should get rid of it, though you can also just turn it briefly off by using the "off" button on the toolbar. I hope it helps!!

ty for sharing your work!!

Thank you so much for your kind message, I'm literally so happy that people are finding it helpful, I'm blown away by the positive reception!

It's so funny that I get this ask just now because I just opened tumblr to make a post about the PDF files issue.

I've been doing some research and it turns out that addons are flat out not allowed access to the Firefox and Chrome PDF viewers, but that doesn't mean all is lost. It seems I might be able to create my own PDF viewer bundled with the addon, so I will try to do that this week.

Since I'm at it I'm going to take this opportunity to answer some other frequently asked questions from the notes! Here's all the cases I've been asked to cover and my current progress with that, plus some known bugs. Help is welcome if anyone has advice on how to tackle these issues!

1. Wikipedia:

The addon mostly works on wikipedia, however it struggles to detect periods (sentence ends) sometimes when there are source links involved. You can expect this to be fixed in the next update.

2. AO3:

The addon mostly works on AO3, but out of all the fics I've tried, I'd say 9 out of 10 work as intended, but a small amount require you to annoyingly step through the page buttons and tags before you can get to the main text.

This is surprising because you would expect all the fics in the same website to have the same HTML structure, but it seems something is making some a little different, enough that the "main body of text" identification breaks with them. I am investigating the issue and I hope to fix it by the next update too.

thank you so much i was so happy to get this message ❤️❤️❤️ i am literally blown away by the reception, every time i open my notifs there are so many people thanking me and talking about how much it's helping them i didn't expect anyone outside of my circle of mutuals to even try it but it's already at over 10k notes in one day haha it barely feels real that so many people are using it, over 200 users already it feels really nice to have made something that people find helpful!!! (also it's a browser extension - basically a little something you can add to your web browser, like adblock, to add extra features to it. what my extension does is to let you read a text sentence-by-sentence so the big block of text doesn't become overwhelming. i'm throwing the gifs in again below in case any regulars missed what the recent fuss on my blog is about)

Thank you so much for your message it warms my heart to see interest in my addon! I definitely want to open source it! It's public on GitHub right now, I just haven't gotten around to make the repo presentable yet. Do you know if there's some sort of discord server or other online community for accessibility tool makers? I'd love to see examples of how others structure their repos to follow them since I am pretty new to this (I am normally a React and three.js developer + Blender addon maker). https://github.com/CarlaCGDM/sentence-stepper The code itself is pretty straightforward, if anyone wants to fork and experiment with different styles or make contributions I would be thrilled to see what people make! It's important to me that the code is public in case I am for any reason no longer able to maintain it, then users could still download previous versions and manually add them to their browsers.

I am so so so happy to hear this this is genuinely so amazing!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ I am experiencing the same, so many texts that were languishing in my open tabs for weeks got finally read soon after I finished the extension.

If you want to keep up with new features please follow my dev blog @carladevv. Feel free to request additional features there if you need them, I am doing my best to get to all of them.

[ID: The first image shows a page from a PDF file with a short story by writer Julio Cortázar.

The entire PDF has a white overlay over it, dimming most of the text. The area approximately matching one of the sentences is cut out of the overlay, revealing the original text underneath. The revealed sentence has a faint yellow highlight overlay. It roughly mimics the behavior of the Sentence-Stepper reader addon.

The second image shows the same page from the same PDF file converted to HTML format.

The page is displayed in dark mode with white text against a dark gray background, and the Sentence-Stepper reader addon is being used on it, like it would be used on any normal website.

Both files are seen inside a custom rudimentary PDF viewer which allows for the options to load a new PDF file, move back and forth through pages and jump to a specific page. END ID.]

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Here's how the pdf situation is going at the moment, I'm making my own built-in viewer and I have two options I want to include:

1️⃣ Load a PDF as-is and use overlays to mimic the highlight effect:

Since I can't actually edit the PDF's text, I'm overlaying a white semi-transparent sheet and then cutting holes into it so you can see the sentence underneath (with dark mode I overlay a black sheet instead).

The downside of this is that I can't use my styles from the regular addon's toolbar, I'm forced to make new ones that overlay on top of the text unless I can figure out how to manipulate the text itself. I'm still working out how to properly separate the sentences and correctly position the overlay effects.

But the obvious positive is that the PDF is visually unaltered save for the overlays, which I can imagine is needed for complex formats like scientific articles or magazines.

2️⃣ Parse the PDF's content as HTML

This has the advantage of allowing for true dark mode, font size change, and the full use of the Sentence-Stepper addon as you would use it on any other website.

However it has the downside that it would mostly work only with PDFs that are just simple plain text. I'm trying to figure out how to preserve images and data tables but most of the formatting would be lost in the conversion.

I suppose something is better than nothing? I want to include both options. However I'm struggling with the issue that bundling in the PDF viewer makes the addon go from a just a few mere kilobytes to 35Mbs in size, so maybe I will ship the PDF viewer separately as a different addon ("PDF-stepper"?) to preserve Sentence-Stepper's current light weight as it is.