Cognitive tools

Tools that help if reading dense text, complex pages, or fast state changes is hard for you. Helpful for cognitive load, dyslexia, ADHD, and ESL readers.

Focus mode

What it does. Dims everything on the page except the element you’re pointing at. The element you focus is rendered in full color; the rest of the page fades to a low-contrast gray.

When to use. Articles full of sidebars, ads, popovers, and related-content rails. Email apps with cluttered chrome. Anywhere you want to “delete” the surrounding noise without actually removing it.

How. Click Focus mode in the popup. Hover or focus elements to bring them forward. Click again to turn off.

WCAG: 1.4.8, 2.4.11.

Remove distractions

What it does. Hides ads, sticky popups, autoplay video, and sidebars. Unlike Focus mode, this removes them from view, not just dims them.

When to use. Reading sites with aggressive ad layouts, news sites with sticky headers and footers, sites with autoplay video that won’t pause.

How. Click Remove distractions. Click Restore if you want them back.

Limits. Detection is heuristic; some pages have clever inline-ad layouts that look like content. If something legit gets hidden, the panel has a “show this anyway” button.

WCAG: 2.2.2.

Explain in simpler words

What it does. Rewrites the text you’ve selected at a 6th-grade reading level, preserving the meaning but using shorter sentences and simpler vocabulary.

When to use. Legal text, terms of service, medical descriptions, dense academic prose, jargon-heavy news.

How. Select the passage you want simplified, then either:

Click Explain in simpler words in the popup, or
Press Ctrl+Shift+X.

A panel shows the rewrite next to the original.

WCAG: 3.1.5.

Summarize this page

What it does. A 3–5-sentence summary of the entire page.

When to use. Long-form articles, multi-page docs, news pages where you want the gist before deciding whether to read the whole thing.

How. Click Summarize this page or press Ctrl+Shift+U.

WCAG: 3.1.5.

Translate selection

What it does. Translates the selected text to your preferred language using the cloud translation model.

When to use. Foreign-language passages on otherwise-English pages, or any page in a language you don’t read fluently.

How. Set your preferred target language in the popup settings (defaults to your browser’s primary language). Select text and click Translate selection, or press Ctrl+Shift+T.

WCAG: 3.1.2.

Define selected word

What it does. Inline dictionary lookup. Pop-up explains the word, gives an example sentence, and reads it aloud.

When to use. Quick lookup without leaving the page. Built-in example sentence helps disambiguate when a word has multiple meanings.

How. Select a word and click Define or press Ctrl+Shift+D.

WCAG: 3.1.3.

Status monitor

What it does. Watches the page for status messages — toasts, snackbars, role="alert" regions, aria-live regions — and announces them via TTS as they appear. Also surfaces them in a side panel so you can review what was announced (TTS is ephemeral).

When to use. Web apps that announce success / error / state changes via toast messages that vanish in a few seconds. Banking apps, e-commerce checkouts, single-page apps with lots of background updates.

How. Click Announce page status in the popup. Stays on across pages.

WCAG: 4.1.3 Status Messages.

Watch for timeouts

What it does. Detects session-timeout countdown elements (role=timer, aria-live with countdown numbers, common class/id-named countdowns). At 60s / 30s / 10s remaining, Wholisphere speaks the warning so you hear it without checking the screen. The side panel offers a one-click “click stay-active button on page” action — Wholisphere finds the page’s own extend-session button by text-matching (“stay”, “extend”, “continue”, “keep me”, etc.) and clicks it on your confirmation. Wholisphere never auto-clicks without your explicit confirmation.

When to use. Banking, healthcare portals, government e-filing sites, any app that logs you out for inactivity.

How. Click Watch for timeouts. Wholisphere scans on enable and re-scans every second.

WCAG: 2.2.1, 2.2.6 Timing Adjustable.

CAPTCHA assist

What it does. Detects well-known CAPTCHA providers (Google reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile) and generic captcha images. For each, a side panel:

Explains the challenge in plain language.
Highlights the provider’s audio fallback if one exists.
For challenges visible in the page DOM, offers a Describe puzzle button that sends a screenshot to the cloud vision model and speaks the description.

Wholisphere does NOT submit CAPTCHA answers for you. Auto-solving CAPTCHAs violates the site’s terms of service and the bot-detection contract. We just make the puzzle perceivable. You always type the answer yourself.

When to use. Whenever a CAPTCHA appears.

How. Click CAPTCHA assist. Side panel lists detected challenges.

WCAG: 3.3.8, 3.3.9 Accessible Authentication.

Form helper

What it does. When you focus a form field, Wholisphere explains what the field expects in plain language and validates your input as you type.

When to use. Forms with poorly-labeled or undocumented fields. Forms that hide validation rules until you submit.

How. Click Form helper. Wholisphere annotates focused fields with hints. Press F1 (mnemonic: form help) for explicit help on the focused field at any time.

WCAG: 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3.

Save form drafts

What it does. Auto-saves your form input locally every few seconds. If you reload the page or accidentally navigate away, Wholisphere offers to restore your draft when you return.

When to use. Long forms, comment boxes, contact forms — any input where losing your typing would hurt.

How. Click Save form drafts. Stays on. Drafts are local-only, in chrome.storage.local, capped at 5 MB total.

WCAG: 3.3.4, 3.3.6 Error Recovery.