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The whole web, easier to read.
Aurora Toolkit is a free Chrome extension with six on-page accessibility tools — reading guides, annotations, color themes, comfortable fonts, read-aloud, and comfort settings for video. Always on by default, and always under your control, site by site.
Runs on your device No accounts, no analytics Free, no sign-up
Six tools, one small button, nothing you didn't ask for
Aurora Toolkit is one extension built à la carte. Turn a tool on and it works on the pages you allow; leave it off and it simply isn't running — not idle, not waiting in the background.
Always on, until you say otherwise
It runs everywhere by default to make browsing easy. One click excludes the site you're on — or flip to allow-list mode and it runs only on the sites you want.
Exactly what you need, nothing more
Only the tools you switch on are loaded, so pages stay fast. Everything else sits out of the way until you want it.
One small icon, endless customization
All your controls in one easy place, and you can move the icon wherever suits you. Or press Alt+Shift+A to land on it without a mouse.
The toolbar popup
Dive deeper into the extension
Every tool below has a live demo you can play with, right here on this page.
Stay on the line you're reading
A bright focus line, and two masks that dim everything except a clear band around it. Turn on Autofollow and the band tracks your mouse; leave it off and drag the grip on the left edge — or nudge it with the arrow keys.
Reading Tools
A color engine that reads the site first
Nineteen ready-made themes — Smart Dark, a Dark Reader–powered dark mode, grayscale, and sixteen high-contrast duotones — plus a builder for your own. Open the dropdown and every theme previews on the sample site as you move through it.
Color Engine
Your colors are added to the theme list as Your colours.
Type you can actually read
Swap the page's reading text for a font that suits you, then open up the space between lines, letters, and words until it stops feeling cramped.
Font Engine
Draw on the web, and come back to it
Pen, highlighter, and a stroke eraser, straight on the page. Ink is vector, so it stays razor sharp at any zoom — and it's saved for that page, so it's still there tomorrow.
Notes & Annotation
On a real page: Z undoes while a drawing tool is active, and Esc takes you out of drawing mode.
It reads the page out loud — and the pictures too
Press play and every visible block becomes a reading unit, highlighted as it's spoken. Click any paragraph to start from there. And when the words are baked into an image, on-device text recognition digs them out and reads those too.
Read Aloud
Uses one of your browser's own voices. The extension defaults to an on-device voice so the text never leaves your computer.
Freeze Frame
Freeze Frame snapshots the screen and holds it still — useful when what you're reading won't stay put, like a livestream or a slide that keeps advancing. Everything in that snapshot becomes readable: ordinary text and words baked into a picture alike, because once it's frozen it's all just pixels. The sample here is the hard case — a photo with no selectable text in it at all.
Make any video comfortable to watch
Eight adjustments applied to any video you play — plus Adaptive High Contrast, which measures the picture as it goes and keeps it readable while the scene changes.
Video Tools
Any slider you touch switches the preset to Custom — the same as in the extension, so you never lose your own picture to a named one.
Live stream by Marine Mammal Rescue (opens in a new tab), embedded muted from Twitch.
On a real page these controls apply to real
<video> elements, this one included.
Adaptive High Contrast works by measuring the picture, and a web page can't read pixels back out of an embedded stream — so the demo swaps in a drawn scene for that mode. Inside the extension it measures the real video.
Built to be used by everyone
Accessibility isn't a settings page you visit once.
Full keyboard control
Reach the floating button from anywhere with a shortcut — Alt+Shift+A — then move between tools with the arrow keys and Tab, so it stays screen-reader friendly.
Private by design
No accounts, no analytics, no servers of ours to send anything to. Your settings and your page notes live in your own browser.
Follows you, or doesn't
Settings save through Chrome's own sync, so your setup is waiting on your other computers if you're signed in. Prefer files? Export everything to JSON and import it on the next machine.
Two interface themes
Aurora for a calm dark panel, or High-Vis — black, white, and yellow with heavier borders — for maximum separation. Try them at the top of this page; it's the same pair the extension ships. Duotone themes can restyle the toolkit's menus to match, too.
Calm by default
Reduced-motion preferences are honoured, nothing strobes, and nothing moves unless you asked it to. Modules ship switched off — you turn on exactly what you want in a short setup tour.
The fast lane
These four are bound out of the box. Each module also has its own toggle shortcut, left unassigned so it can't collide with anything you already use — bind them, or rebind these, on Chrome's shortcuts page.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|
To change these, open Chrome's own shortcut page — paste
chrome://extensions/shortcuts into the address bar (links to chrome:// pages
can't be clicked from a website, by design).
What leaves your browser, and what doesn't
Aurora Toolkit has no accounts, no analytics, and no tracking, and there are no servers on our side — so we never receive, store, or have access to your data. Your settings and your notes stay in your own browser.
- Your settings — modules, colours, fonts, reading and read-aloud preferences, your per-site
list — are saved with Chrome's
storage.sync. If you're signed in to Chrome, Chrome syncs them across your own devices. - Your page notes are saved with
storage.local, keyed to the page's address, so they reappear when you come back. They never leave the device they were drawn on. - Page content is processed on your device to render the tools. English text recognition is bundled and runs fully offline.
Permissions, and why
<all_urls> + scripting | To show the tools on the pages you allow |
tabs | To read the current address for your site list, and to snapshot the visible tab for Freeze Frame |
tts | To speak page text with your system voices |
offscreen | To run the bundled recognition engine, as Chrome requires |
storage | To save your settings and notes |
It does not touch your browsing history, form data, or passwords.
Before you install
Is it free?
Yes — free, with no account, no trial, and nothing to buy later.
Why does it need access to every site?
Because the tools draw on the page you're reading, and it can't know in advance which page that is. The trade is under your control in both directions: keep the default and one click excludes a site, or flip to allow-list mode so it runs only on the sites you name.
Will it break the sites I use?
The design tries hard not to. Overlays are click-through, font changes target reading text rather than icons, and colour themes run as a single GPU filter instead of rewriting the site's CSS. If a particular site does misbehave, exclude just that site — or just that section of it — and everything else keeps working.
Does it work everywhere in the browser?
No extension can run on Chrome's own pages (chrome:// settings, the Web Store, the new
tab page) — Chrome blocks that for everyone. Built-in PDF and image viewers are also off-limits to
page scripts. Everywhere else, including pages inside iframes, is fair game.
Chrome only?
It's built and tested for Chrome, and it also runs on Chromium browsers that support Manifest V3 and offscreen documents — Edge, Brave, Opera, and friends. Safari and Firefox use different extension systems and aren't supported.
What does "beta" mean here?
That it's real, usable, and still improving on a regular basis — you may meet the occasional rough edge. Bug reports genuinely help: hello@aurora.tools.
Is this the same thing as VDO Magnifier?
They're siblings. VDO Magnifier is a browser-based magnifier for a shared screen or video stream, and it's where a lot of this was worked out first — the colour matrices, the reading guides, the annotation tools. Aurora Toolkit takes those ideas and applies them to the pages you browse.