Free + licensed

Bionic reading on any web page, free.

Skimora bolds the first letters of each word and leaves the rest light, so your eyes have a place to land on every word and keep moving down the line.

Free at a fixed strength. Adjustable strength and colour are part of the license.

A long paragraph is a wall. Somewhere in the middle of it your attention leaves, and your eyes keep travelling over words you are no longer taking in. Then you notice, and you go back to the start of the line, and the wall is a little taller than before.

Your eyes slide off the line

Plain text gives your eyes nothing to hold. Every word looks like the last one, so you drift, drop back, and read the same line a second time.

What you get

Bold where your eyes land

At the default strength about 40% of a word's letters are bold, and never the whole word. The light tail is what your eye skims over.

Words stay whole

Contractions like don't, decimals like 3.14 and hyphenated words like state-of-the-art each stay in one piece. It also works for languages written without spaces, such as Chinese and Thai, and for Devanagari.

Put back exactly as it was

Stop reading turns everything off and restores the page. Skimora never bolds text you can type into, so forms and editors are left alone.

Tuned for the sites you read in

GitHub, Jira, Notion and Slack get targeted handling, so the pacers find the text you are actually reading.

Reading Area Licensed

Drag a box around any part of the page and bold just that part. Clear Reading removes it. Reading Area is part of the license, and it is unavailable while Bionic is already on.

What you can change

Bionic reading settings
SettingWhat you can change
Bold strengthFree: fixed at 0.5. Licensed: 0 to 1 in steps of 0.05, which bolds 15% to 65% of each word.
Bold colourFree: matches the text. Licensed: any colour you choose.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts
KeysWhat they do
Shift + SpaceHide or show the toolbar
EscHide the toolbar

Works well on

  • Articles, blogs and documentation
  • GitHub, Jira, Notion and Slack pages
  • Text in most languages, including Chinese, Thai and Devanagari

Doesn't work on

  • Chrome's own pages, the Chrome Web Store and Chrome's built-in PDF viewer (open PDFs in the Skimora reader instead)
  • Text fields and editable pages. On Notion pages you can edit, use Lock page first.
  • Arabic and other cursive scripts: their letters change shape when split, so Skimora leaves those words unbolded rather than showing them broken

Questions about Bionic reading

Is bionic reading free in Skimora?

Yes. Bolding on any page you can read is free, with no account. The strength is fixed at 0.5. Changing the strength and the bold colour is part of the lifetime license.

Does bionic reading make you read faster?

Skimora does not promise that. The research on bionic reading is mixed: some readers find bold word starts easier to follow and others do not. Because it costs nothing, try it on a page you actually need to read and keep it only if it helps.

Will it break the page?

No. Skimora works reversibly, and Stop reading puts the page back the way it was. It also skips text you can type into.

Unlock Bionic reading for $19.

One payment, no subscription. Bionic reading stays free either way.

See what's free

No account. Only your license key ever leaves your browser.

Skimora lifetime $19 once. 14-day money-back guarantee.

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