Try it here
A reading guide does not move the words. It moves your attention across them, at a pace you set, on the page exactly as its author laid it out.
The images stay. The links stay. Nothing is extracted, and nothing you were about to click has moved.
Space plays. Arrow keys step a word. Click any word to start there.
WordGlide
A free reading guide for the page you are already on. It leaves the layout, the images, the links and the code exactly where they are, and glides through the words at the pace you set.
Get it on the Chrome Web Store Coming soon
Available today by building it from source — about a minute, and it is the same extension.
How it moves
Three decisions separate a guide you can follow from a marker that flickers. All three are visible above; this is what they are.
- Speed
- 60–1000 wpm
- Guide styles
- 3 cursor, highlight, outline
- Permissions
- 3 and no host access
- Data sent anywhere
- None
- Price
- Free no account
What you get
-
Three ways to be guided
A cursor under the line — hand, dot or arrow, sized to taste, the dot leaving a short trail behind it. A highlight over each word, or groups of up to four. An outline around the word and nothing else.
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It glides, it doesn't blink
Every guide travels continuously across the word and the gap to the next one. That is the difference between something you can follow and something you have to chase.
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It picks its own colour
It reads the actual background behind the text and goes dark green on a light article, pale green on a dark one. Or pick green, blue, purple, red, orange or black yourself.
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You choose the passage
Start at the top, or click any word. Set an end word. Select text before you activate and that becomes the passage. If it grabs the wrong block, point at the right one.
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Pauses that sound like reading
A comma gets 1.25×, a sentence end 1.5×, a paragraph 1.8×. New lines get a 120 ms settle, so your eye arrives before the guide does. No word is ever skipped.
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Scrolls without losing you
The page eases itself along to keep the word in a comfortable band. Touch it, scroll it, switch tabs — it stops instantly and stays stopped until you say otherwise.
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Gets out of the way
The panel collapses to a small circle you can drag anywhere, or hide entirely while the guide keeps running. Space plays, Esc pauses, Alt with ← → steps a word.
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Reads real pages
Ordinary articles and rendered GitHub READMEs: headings, lists, quotes, links and inline code. Navigation, fenced code blocks and tables are stepped over.
WordGlide or RSVP Reader?
They solve the same problem from opposite ends. If you would have hit reader mode, use the reader. If closing the page would lose you something — the diagram, the code block, the link you were about to follow — use WordGlide.
| Aspect | RSVP Reader | WordGlide |
|---|---|---|
| Where you read | On the site | The page you are already on |
| What moves | The words. Your eye holds one column | Your eye. The words hold still |
| The page | Extracted — nav, ads and images stripped | Untouched — everything stays |
| Speed | 100–1000 wpm | 60–1000 wpm |
| You need | A link. Any browser | Chrome or Brave on desktop |
Get it
One click, automatic updates, Chrome and Brave both — as soon as the listing is published.
Get it on the Chrome Web Store Coming soon
Or build it today
Needs Node 22.18 or newer, once. It is the same extension.
- Clone github.com/6D-pixel/wordglide,
then run
npm install && npm run build. - Open
chrome://extensions— orbrave://extensions. - Turn on Developer mode.
- Click Load unpacked and pick the
distfolder. - Pin it, open an article, click it.
The first time you open it, it offers a walkthrough that runs on the page you are actually on rather than a mock-up. It waits for you to pick a word, change the speed and press space — and the speed you set during it is a real setting, not a rehearsal.
It doesn't phone home
WordGlide runs entirely in your browser, on the page you activated it on. No server, no account, no reading history, no analytics. Article text is never sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to be sent.
It asks for exactly three things — temporary access to the current tab, permission to inject
its script, and local storage for your settings: activeTab,
scripting, storage. No standing access to any site. The one
outbound request it can make is opening the example article in the walkthrough, and only if
you click that button.
Where it won't work
Desktop Chromium only, on left-to-right pages. It cannot run where extensions are not allowed to: the browser's own pages, the extension store, the built-in PDF viewer, text drawn into a canvas, embedded frames and closed shadow roots. Unusual layouts may need you to point it at a smaller reading area. And no claim is made that this improves comprehension, or that one speed suits everybody.