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User guide

Reading any page

There are five ways to tell Readalix what to read, and which one you reach for depends on how much of the page you want.

On this page

What you selected

Select text, open the toolbar, press play. This is the case the extension is built around: it reads what you chose, in the order you chose it, and stops at the end of the selection.

The selection can span several paragraphs, a table cell, a list, or a single line. It can also sit inside an iframe, a shadow DOM component or a web app shell. Whichever frame owns the selection is the one that speaks.

A selected passage being read on a normal web page, the current sentence tinted and the current word highlighted.
A selection, read back with the sentence tinted and the word lit.

The whole article

Press play with nothing selected and Readalix looks for the article container on the page and reads that: the headline and the body, without the navigation, the sidebar, the cookie bar or the footer.

It looks inside large frames as well as the top document, because plenty of apps render their whole page inside one big iframe. Small frames are ignored on purpose, so an ad slot or a chat widget never ends up speaking for the tab.

If there is no confident article on the page, nothing is read and a short note asks you to select something first. That is deliberate: guessing wrong and reading a menu aloud is worse than asking.

From a point you pick

Sometimes the part you want is not an article and not worth dragging over. Use the picker:

  1. Press the pick button in the toolbar. The toolbar stays open, so you can still change voice or speed first.
  2. Move the pointer over the page. Whatever is under it is marked, so you can see exactly what a click would take.
  3. Click. The read starts at that element and runs to the end of the page.

If you would rather it read only the element you clicked and then stop, turn on Read only the picked element, which lives in the pick button's own options in Settings, Toolbar. Press Esc to disarm the picker without reading anything.

An article with the picker armed: the paragraph under the pointer is filled with the picker colour, ready to be clicked to start reading there.
With the picker armed, whatever is under the pointer is marked. Click it to read from there.

Form fields and iframes

A text box counts as text. Select inside a search box, a comment field, a textarea or a rich-text editor and press play, and Readalix reads the value, not the page around it. This is the fastest proofread there is for something you have just written.

Content inside iframes works the same way, which is what makes embedded documents, help widgets and app shells readable.

Readalix adds a single item to Chrome's context menu, and that item renames itself to match whatever you right-clicked:

  • Read selectionYou right-clicked inside a selection.
  • Read this input, or Read this textareaYou right-clicked a form field.
  • Read thisAn editable area, such as a rich-text editor.
  • Read from hereAnywhere else on the page. Reading runs from that spot to the end, or reads just that element if you turned that setting on.

The item also shows your read shortcut, so you stop needing the menu soon enough.

Chrome's right-click menu over a selected paragraph, carrying one Readalix item that reads Read selection, with Ctrl+Alt+R beside it.
Right-clicked inside a selection: Read selection.
Chrome's right-click menu on a page with nothing selected, carrying one Readalix item that reads Read from here, with Ctrl+Alt+R beside it.
The same item on the same page with nothing selected: Read from here.

Stopping

Click anywhere on the page, or press Esc. Both stop the read where it is, and pressing your read shortcut again toggles it off. Pausing instead of stopping keeps your place: see Playback controls.