Improving Reading Focus by Dimming Online Distractions

The Information Superhighway is Lined with Billboards — We’re Here to Help

Reading on the web is distracting. Not only are you bombarded by email dings, calendar reminders, and Slack notifications, the very website you’re reading is preventing you from focusing.

How? By surrounding the one thing you care about — the body text on the page — with a rotating cast of colorful icons, calling out to you:

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Focus Mode: Blinders for the Internet

We’re helping people focus while reading by literally dimming these online distractions. Here’s how it works:

Focus Mode dims the distractions that surround the article

• You can customize the level of dimming from 1% to 100%
• Whenever you move the mouse, the dimming disappears — so you can click on links or navigate the site (this is also why it’s better than using the “reader mode” offered in some browsers, which has to be deactivated before you can resume navigation)
• You can deactivate Focus Mode for any websites that don’t work well with it

BeeLine Reader + Focus Mode: flipping the script to make websites more readable

Focus Mode is the latest addition to the BeeLine Reader Chrome extension, which people around the world use millions of times a week. The main function of BeeLine Reader is to enhance reading ease, speed, and focus by applying a line-wrapping color gradient to text (see demo below, if this is the first time you’ve heard of BeeLine).

With the addition of Focus Mode, we’re taking things one step further to improve website readability. Instead of making you focus on boring black text — which is the least visually interesting thing on the page — we format the web in a reader-centric way. We dim the distractions and apply our focus-enhancing color gradient to the body text, which makes it supremely easy to focus while reading.

Millions of people still prefer reading books on paper instead of on screens, in part because reading on paper is less distracting. But the internet has so much useful information that we obviously can’t do without it. At BeeLine Reader, we’re working to make digital reading less distracting and more efficient.

Ready to check out distraction-dimming Focus Mode? Grab the BeeLine Reader Chrome extension and see how much it helps you focus online!

To learn more about BeeLine Reader, a company that has won social impact awards from Stanford University and the Tech Museum of Innovation, see BeeLineReader.com. Questions? Email [email protected]