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Wholisphere Docs

Wholisphere user guide

Welcome. Wholisphere is a browser extension that gives you an AI accessibility agent on every web page you visit. It replaces — or sits beside — traditional assistive technology like NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, ChromeVox, and Dragon, with one important difference: it understands the page’s meaning, not just its markup, so it can describe an image, summarize a paragraph, fill in a missing caption, or click a button you described in plain English.

This guide is for the person using Wholisphere. For developer or integrator docs, see the rest of this site — start with What is Wholisphere? and the Integrate section.

Who is this for

Wholisphere is built for anyone who finds a web page hard to use without help. Pick the path that matches you:

  • You can’t see the screen, or only partly → start with the Screen reader guide. The screen reader is the heart of Wholisphere; everything else slots into it.
  • You can’t hear, or only partly → start with Hearing tools. Live captions, audio-only transcripts, and voice clarity boosting.
  • You read better with help (cognitive load, dyslexia, ESL) → start with Cognitive tools. Plain-English rewrites, summaries, definitions, focus mode, distraction removal.
  • You can’t use a mouse, or you use voice / switch / eye-gaze input → start with Motor tools. Voice commands, keyboard helper, drag-free reorder.
  • You’re sensitive to flashing or motion → see Vision tools (motion-safe, flash protection) and start with the popup toggles.

60-second tour

  1. Install the Wholisphere extension. (Currently dev-mode; see Install the extension for unpacked install steps.)
  2. Pin the Wholisphere icon to your browser toolbar so you can reach it on any page.
  3. Click the icon to open the popup. This is your control surface — it’s a list of capabilities organized by what they help with (vision / hearing / cognitive / motor).
  4. Click any capability to turn it on. Most are toggles — click again to turn off. A few are one-shots (Describe image, Summarize this page) that run once and finish.
  5. For the screen reader, the popup hands off to keyboard commands. See the Screen reader and Keyboard reference guides.

That’s it. You don’t need to memorize anything to start. Wholisphere is designed so the popup tells you what each button does, in plain language, before you click it.

Reading order

If you only read three pages, read these:

  1. Install the extension — install, first run, what to expect.
  2. Modes — Browse mode vs Focus mode, the single most important concept for using the screen reader effectively.
  3. Keyboard reference — every shortcut in one place, organized by what you’re trying to do.

Then dive into the modality guide that matches you.

Bring your own model

Wholisphere can route the cloud-AI capabilities through your own Anthropic or Google AI key instead of our backend, for compliance, cost pass-through, or model preference. See Bring your own model.

Privacy and data

The short version: by default, nothing leaves your browser except the specific page text or image you ask Wholisphere to process with cloud AI (e.g., when you click “Describe image” or “Summarize this page”). All preferences and the activity journal stay on your laptop in chrome.storage.local.

For the long version, capability-by-capability, see Privacy.

Accessibility of Wholisphere itself

We are an accessibility tool, so we hold ourselves to the standards we’d hold any product to. Wholisphere’s own UI surfaces (popup, in-page widget, side panels) target WCAG 2.2 AA in the short term and AAA where reasonable. Self-conformance status:

Reference appendix

  • Keyboard reference — every shortcut, organized by what you’re trying to do. The full table (including NVDA-compatible bindings) is generated from the capability registry on every release.
  • Generate a VPAT — the auto-generated VPAT.

Where to ask for help

This is a prototype. If something’s broken or confusing:

We answer.