(Positive reviews and sharing to other platforms are other great ways to support the addon's growth!)
⚙️ Open Source code:
https://github.com/CarlaCGDM/sentence-stepper
[ID. Two gifs of the accessibility tool in action. They highlight one sentence at a time for ease of readability.
The first gif shows the tool cycling down the paragraphs, from sentence to sentence, in a thick yellow highlight.
The second gif shows the different highlight styles such as; a thick yellow, a thinner yellow, no highlight at all, a gradient highlight, blocky tri-color highlight by line, and colored text by line. End ID.]
(Thank you @wistoreal for the ID.)
See progress on y'alls requests and suggestions below:
🔜 PDF support: PDFs are not websites and the browser's PDF reader blocks access to addons by design, but I am still working to include it. I am coding my own built-in PDF viewer for this!
✅️ Customization: Added a global settings panel with custom colors and hotkeys as requested by users in v0.3.0
✅️ New ways to step: Step paragraph-by-paragraph and soft transition mode were added in v0.3.0 alongside a bookmark option (activated by default).
🔜 Mobile support: I am targeting Firefox mobile and doing further research on other mobile browsers for future updates. Unfortunately it seems Chrome doesn't support add-ons on mobile.
🔜 Other browsers: I am targeting Safari, Edge and Opera in future updates. DuckDuckGo and IronFox have also been requested and noted!
🔜 Tumblr & other socials: I will add support for infinite scrolling and click-to-highlight in future updates. I am studying the viability of expanding sentence detection to work with all-lowercase paragraphs without hurting the overall detection accuracy.
❓️ Google Docs: It's a little tricky to get addons to work well on gdocs but I hope to have it working soon!
❓️ Older versions of Chrome and Firefox: If there are any issues, please send me a report including your browser version and issue and I will do what I can to help.
🚫 Propietary textbook sites: Very likely impossible for the addon to access the copyright-protected, scrapping-protected iframe text. If anyone has insight it is greatly appreciated. Let's keep fighting for a fully open internet. Update: I have been trying to contact textbook platforms for partnership without much luck haha.
🐝 Known bugs:
Wikipedia source links sometimes interfere with sentence detection. You can expect this fixed by the next update.
Text in image carousels is dimmed but not picked up for stepping. I'm studying if I should not dim it or try to get it picked up.
The addon conflicts with BeelineReader, which makes sense since they manipulate the same page elements. The same is true for other extensions that alter text color or rely on exact text placement. It's one or the other at a time, I'm afraid!
dumb ask maybe but 1 how do i know if it's working (firefox) and 2 can you add instructions on how to activate it to the extension itself because maybe i'm dumb but ???
hi anon thank you for reaching out! i'm working on the page on the firefox and chrome storefronts for the next update.
in the meantime here's the step by step i follow to install it and use it, i hope it works for you! i think the general steps are the same for all extensions
1. go to addon page: https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addon/sentence-stepper/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org
2. click big "add to firefox" button (sorry that my page is in spanish, it's the big blue button)
[ID: screenshot of the addon page in the link with an arrow pointing to the "add to firefox" button, in spanish language. END ID]
3. click "accept" on all dialogs and check boxes according to your preference. i reccommend checking the "pin to toolbar" option (it's pinned by default) so you can always access the addon's features with just one click
[ID: cropped screenshot showing a dialog in spanish that says: "sentence stepper has been added", alongside a checkbox to pin the extension to the firefox toolbar, which is checked in. END ID]
4. go to a different site to test the addon on since the addons page doesnt let addons run on itself
here's a book from Project Gutenberg that you can use for testing: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10007/10007-h/10007-h.htm#pref01
5. click the icon button on the toolbar! i know the icon is terrible i will update it in the next update.
in any case you should see the sentence-stepper toolbar appear, and the text around the first sentence dim!
[ID: a screenshot of the above step followed by a closeup of the spot where the addon button is located]
6. from here on you can use the "prev" and "next" buttons on the toolbar to move through the text or ALT + <- and -> on your keyboard. Reloading the page should get rid of it, though you can also just turn it briefly off by using the "off" button on the toolbar.
I hope it helps!!
If you or anyone wants to support development so I can keep improving the addon you can do it here: https://ko-fi.com/Z8Z61KT5MM (I'm so grateful to the person who already donated!!!)
Hii i love your extension I’m gonna use it a lot i think!! Large blocks of text give me headaches bc my eyes keep jumping around so I’m very hopeful this will help with that :) It’s so nice that it blurs out the rest of the text, and that you can use your keys to move between sentences 💞💞💞 i was wondering if there’s any way to make it work for pdf files? (I know that’s a long shot because it’s not html text blocks (as far as i know anyway hahah))
ty for sharing your work!!
Thank you so much for your kind message, I'm literally so happy that people are finding it helpful, I'm blown away by the positive reception!
It's so funny that I get this ask just now because I just opened tumblr to make a post about the PDF files issue.
I've been doing some research and it turns out that addons are flat out not allowed access to the Firefox and Chrome PDF viewers, but that doesn't mean all is lost. It seems I might be able to create my own PDF viewer bundled with the addon, so I will try to do that this week.
Since I'm at it I'm going to take this opportunity to answer some other frequently asked questions from the notes! Here's all the cases I've been asked to cover and my current progress with that, plus some known bugs. Help is welcome if anyone has advice on how to tackle these issues!
1. Wikipedia:
The addon mostly works on wikipedia, however it struggles to detect periods (sentence ends) sometimes when there are source links involved. You can expect this to be fixed in the next update.
2. AO3:
The addon mostly works on AO3, but out of all the fics I've tried, I'd say 9 out of 10 work as intended, but a small amount require you to annoyingly step through the page buttons and tags before you can get to the main text.
This is surprising because you would expect all the fics in the same website to have the same HTML structure, but it seems something is making some a little different, enough that the "main body of text" identification breaks with them. I am investigating the issue and I hope to fix it by the next update too.
3. Tumblr:
I did not design the addon with social media in mind, but after receiving some requests I will try to do my best to make it work with Tumblr, since there's quite a few long posts that could benefit from it.
There's a couple challenges though, first of all lots of people use Tumblr with the XKit extension already, which I don't use and am not familiar with, so I have no idea if/how both extensions might conflict. Ideally, it would be amazing if someone who works on/with XKit could advise me or somehow incorporate it as a feature within their own system.
Second, the HTML structure of social media sites is quite different from the "one single block of text" sites I made the addon for, so I need to study it before I can adapt it.
For these two reasons, I don't know if/when I'll be able to make it work on Tumblr, it's not my top priority but I do want to tackle it eventually.
4. Closed access textbook and research paper sites:
A big challenge! Because these sites are paywalled, I have never studied them and I don't know how they work under the hood, so I don't even know if the addon may work on some of them or on none of them.
It's really important for me to make the addon work on these sites, because people need this to study for their classes, so I'll do everything I can to make it happen. Because of the copyright and anti-scrapping features on these sites, it might sadly not be possible for the addon to even access the content of the page at all, though.
Some sites offer free trials, so I will try to investigate.
5. Older versions of Firefox and Chrome:
I have not tested this yet, I have no idea how well the addon performs on older versions of the browsers at the moment.
If anyone wants to send me info on this ("I'm using X version of Chrome and it doesn't work") please feel free to send an ask or leave a comment, it would help a lot! Before you do though, check if the addon works on a wikipedia page to make sure the issue is the browser and not the site.
6. How to support development:
I'm disabled and unemployed due to disability at the moment, so it would be a game changer for me if I could get some income through my tools. I know everyone is broke and I haven't set up the profile properly yet, but since some people wanted to support me, you can leave a tip here:
https://ko-fi.com/Z8Z61KT5MM
It would also help me immensely if all the people leaving these beautiful comments on my post could leave a 4 or 5 stars review in the Firefox and Chrome pages for the addon!!!!!
(As much as I would love to, I can't exactly show y'alls beautiful tumblr comments on my LinkedIn page 😂 Employers will only look at official reviews.)
I don't really know enough about computers to know what this thing you made is, but I'm proud of you for making it! It sounds like it's going to help alot of people
thank you so much i was so happy to get this message ❤️❤️❤️ i am literally blown away by the reception, every time i open my notifs there are so many people thanking me and talking about how much it's helping them
i didn't expect anyone outside of my circle of mutuals to even try it but it's already at over 10k notes in one day haha it barely feels real that so many people are using it, over 200 users already
it feels really nice to have made something that people find helpful!!!
(also it's a browser extension - basically a little something you can add to your web browser, like adblock, to add extra features to it. what my extension does is to let you read a text sentence-by-sentence so the big block of text doesn't become overwhelming. i'm throwing the gifs in again below in case any regulars missed what the recent fuss on my blog is about)
Hello :) Im curius if you would consider open sourcing your browser extension? there is derth of accesability tools in the open source world and something like your text highlighter would be a welcome addition.
Thank you so much for your message it warms my heart to see interest in my addon! I definitely want to open source it! It's public on GitHub right now, I just haven't gotten around to make the repo presentable yet. Do you know if there's some sort of discord server or other online community for accessibility tool makers? I'd love to see examples of how others structure their repos to follow them since I am pretty new to this (I am normally a React and three.js developer + Blender addon maker).
https://github.com/CarlaCGDM/sentence-stepper
The code itself is pretty straightforward, if anyone wants to fork and experiment with different styles or make contributions I would be thrilled to see what people make! It's important to me that the code is public in case I am for any reason no longer able to maintain it, then users could still download previous versions and manually add them to their browsers.
ty for the addon i have a lazy eye and was even considered a "slow reader" in elementary school because i had trouble with the lines of text. back then i used my finger because the books were real.
thank you for your message!! i'm glad the addon is being useful <3<3 i struggled with reading in a disorganized way, i was reading words out of order, skipping some, and then trying to put it all together in my head, so the gradients help me
i recently found your extension and its an actual lifesaver omg. it can sometimes take me weeks to read a single paper because i have terrible concentration issues and keep losing my place but i got through a twelve page paper in a single night last night. thank you so much for putting this out there
I am so so so happy to hear this this is genuinely so amazing!!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ I am experiencing the same, so many texts that were languishing in my open tabs for weeks got finally read soon after I finished the extension.
If you want to keep up with new features please follow my dev blog @carladevv. Feel free to request additional features there if you need them, I am doing my best to get to all of them.
PS: If you could share these same words as a 5 star review it would help me a lot with my career! DW if you can't though, I know a lot of people don't have Mozilla accounts or can't log back into them because they sometimes give issues.
[ID: The first image shows a page from a PDF file with a short story by writer Julio Cortázar.
The entire PDF has a white overlay over it, dimming most of the text. The area approximately matching one of the sentences is cut out of the overlay, revealing the original text underneath. The revealed sentence has a faint yellow highlight overlay. It roughly mimics the behavior of the Sentence-Stepper reader addon.
The second image shows the same page from the same PDF file converted to HTML format.
The page is displayed in dark mode with white text against a dark gray background, and the Sentence-Stepper reader addon is being used on it, like it would be used on any normal website.
Both files are seen inside a custom rudimentary PDF viewer which allows for the options to load a new PDF file, move back and forth through pages and jump to a specific page. END ID.]
---
Here's how the pdf situation is going at the moment, I'm making my own built-in viewer and I have two options I want to include:
1️⃣ Load a PDF as-is and use overlays to mimic the highlight effect:
Since I can't actually edit the PDF's text, I'm overlaying a white semi-transparent sheet and then cutting holes into it so you can see the sentence underneath (with dark mode I overlay a black sheet instead).
The downside of this is that I can't use my styles from the regular addon's toolbar, I'm forced to make new ones that overlay on top of the text unless I can figure out how to manipulate the text itself. I'm still working out how to properly separate the sentences and correctly position the overlay effects.
But the obvious positive is that the PDF is visually unaltered save for the overlays, which I can imagine is needed for complex formats like scientific articles or magazines.
2️⃣ Parse the PDF's content as HTML
This has the advantage of allowing for true dark mode, font size change, and the full use of the Sentence-Stepper addon as you would use it on any other website.
However it has the downside that it would mostly work only with PDFs that are just simple plain text. I'm trying to figure out how to preserve images and data tables but most of the formatting would be lost in the conversion.
I suppose something is better than nothing? I want to include both options. However I'm struggling with the issue that bundling in the PDF viewer makes the addon go from a just a few mere kilobytes to 35Mbs in size, so maybe I will ship the PDF viewer separately as a different addon ("PDF-stepper"?) to preserve Sentence-Stepper's current light weight as it is.
Update on that last part: I got it down to 13MB so I'm bundling it.
