Sometimes the best way to get through a hard page is to stop reading it with your eyes. FocusFlow's Read Aloud (text-to-speech) and Reader Mode are built to combine into an immersive reading stack: a clean, calm page, your chosen voice reading it aloud, and your eyes following along with the text highlighted in sync.
Whether you're managing ADHD, dyslexia, or plain end-of-day screen fatigue, listening while the words light up in front of you can turn a slog into something you can actually sustain. No medical claims — just tools that many readers find easier on the brain.
Here's how the stack works and how to use it.
🔊 Read Aloud: The Basics
FocusFlow uses your browser's built-in speech synthesis, which means the audio is generated on your device — nothing is uploaded, and it works offline. Basic playback is free for everyone.
How to use it
- Open the popup → click Advanced Settings.
- Switch to the Reading tab.
- Find the Text-to-Speech card and toggle it on.
- Select any text on the page, then click Read Aloud — from the popup's Read Aloud tile, the Read selection control in the sidebar's Reading tab, or the right-click menu.
- Listen — playback starts from your selection.
The Read Aloud tile in the popup reads the page's main content, the sidebar's Reading tab has Read selection and Read page controls with transport buttons, and the right-click menu toggles the feature — so whichever surface you're already on, there's a way in.
Make it sound like you
In the same Reading tab you can pick the language and voice (any voice installed on your system) and set the speed from 0.5× to 2×. Prefer to skim by ear? Push it to 1.5×. Working through dense material? Slow it down.
✨ Voice Highlighting: Watch the Words Go By (Pro)
Listening alone still leaves your eyes wandering. Immersion reading fixes that: the word being spoken is highlighted on the page in real time, the sentence it belongs to is marked around it, and the page auto-scrolls to keep the active sentence in view.
- The highlight follows the voice word by word — you always know exactly where you are.
- Auto-scroll keeps the current sentence on screen, so long articles read themselves.
- The highlight colour is yours to choose, and it respects FocusFlow's Reduce Motion setting for follow-scroll.
- Press Escape at any time to stop playback immediately, from anywhere.
Voice highlighting is part of FocusFlow Pro, along with the player below.
🎛️ The Floating Player (Pro)
When reading aloud starts, a small floating player bar appears on the page:
- Previous / Next to skip by sentence — jump back to re-hear a sentence you missed.
- Play/Pause and Stop for basic control.
- A speed button that cycles through 0.75×, 1×, 1.25×, 1.5×, and 2×.
- A progress readout so you know how far through the page you are.
- The bar is draggable, so you can park it wherever it stays out of the way.
And the one shortcut worth memorising: Escape always stops playback, no matter where focus is. It's the guaranteed stop affordance, even for free users who don't have the player.
📖 Reader Mode: The Clean Canvas
Reader Mode strips a page down to just the article — no ads, no sticky headers, no sidebar clutter — and adds structure around it:
- An Outline panel that auto-generates a table of contents from the page headings; click any heading to jump there.
- An Insights panel showing your reading progress, word count, estimated read time, and a readability grade for the current section.
- Six themes (light, sepia, quiet, low-saturation, dark, and dusk) so the canvas itself is comfortable.
- A carousel with Previous/Next arrows when a page has multiple articles or sections.
Open it from the popup's Reader tile, from the Reading tab's Open button, or press ⌥⇧R (Option+Shift+R) on any page.
🧩 Better Together: The Immersive Stack
Here's the payoff. Reader Mode and Read Aloud now share one engine, which means everything you've configured works identically in both places:
- Open Reader Mode on a cluttered article — now it's just text on a calm background.
- Start Read Aloud from the reader — your chosen voice, your chosen speed, and your chosen highlight colour all carry over, live. Change them mid-session and they apply from the next sentence.
- The floating player works inside the reader too, with the same controls and the same rules as on the page.
The result is a genuine deep-focus mode for reading: the clean page removes visual noise, the voice removes decoding work, and the highlighting anchors your attention to exactly one word at a time. Readers who lose their place, re-read sentences when tired, or find their attention sliding off dense paragraphs often find that listening-while-following keeps them on the line.
If your eyes are fried at 9pm but you still want to finish that long read, this is the combination to reach for.
Related Reading
- FocusFlow v2.10.0: Accounts & Sync, Reading List, To-Do Lists & More — what's new in the release that made FocusFlow's setup portable.
- Define, Simplify, Summarize: A Guide to FocusFlow's AI Reading Tools — unpick hard passages and get the gist of long articles.
Try It Today
Read Aloud and Reader Mode are free to use right now in FocusFlow; the floating player and voice highlighting are part of Pro. Update the extension, open a long article, and let the page read itself.