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Bolds the start of each word to give your eye an anchor. Does not change page layout or what screen readers read.

BeBold bolds the first part of every word, so your eye has an anchor to land on as it moves along a line.

Some people find it easier to hold their place while reading. Others find it distracting. The published research has not found a reading-speed benefit, and comprehension results are mixed, so treat this as a preference rather than a technique, try it, and keep it only if it actually helps you. You can turn it off for any single site, or everywhere, in one click.

WHAT IS NEW IN 2.0

Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite of how the effect is drawn.

The old version rebuilt the page's text to bold it, which broke layouts on some sites and, on many modern sites, quietly did nothing at all. Measured across a sample of real pages, it treated about half the words, and on app-style sites far less than that.

2.0 never touches the page. It draws the effect with the browser's own highlight painting, so:

• Nothing moves. Measured across 37 real sites, the worst layout shift of any element on any page was 0.00 pixels. • Copy and paste, find in page, and text selection behave exactly as they did before, because no word is ever split in two. • Screen readers hear the page exactly as it is written. The accessibility tree was byte-identical to the untreated page on all 37 sites tested. • It works on the sites you actually use, including lists, headings, sidebars and pages built out of web components.

WHAT IT WILL NOT TOUCH

Reading speed is never worth a misread character, so BeBold leaves these exactly as written:

• code, in blocks and inline • dosages, account numbers, IBANs and long figures • version strings, links and email addresses • anything you can type into

It switches itself off completely on pages asking for a password or a card number, and any site can opt out with a single meta tag.

WRITING SYSTEMS

Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew are

Arabic, Devanagari and other Indic scKorean, Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese are switched off by default. Not because they are unsupported, but because "the first half of a word" is not a m script where letters join, where vowel signs reorder, or where a word is one or two characters. Each one can be switched on individually if it works

SETTINGS

Three treatments (bold, underline, background tint), five strengths, control over how much of each word is emphasised, a per-sit keyboard shortcut. Every change previews live.

PRIVACY

BeBold makes no network requests of aaccounts, no tracking, no remote configuration. Your settings are stored by Chrome and nothing leaves your browser. The project's build fails automaticaluch as mentions a network API, so this is enforced rather than promised.

Open source: https://github.com/cdukedev/BeBold

NOT A MEDICAL PRODUCT

BeBold is a reading preference. It is is not a treatment for anything, and it is not a substitute for medical advice.