← afterhourChrome extension · Accessibility
Read PDFs without the glare
Chrome's PDF viewer is a wall of glaring white. Paperlight softens it into paper, sepia, or dark, with an intensity slider to dial it in — then reads the document out loud with natural voices that run entirely on your machine.
What it doesTheme · read · relax
Comfortable themesRecolor Chrome's built-in PDF viewer with a Paper, Sepia, or full Dark theme, so a wall of glaring white becomes something you can read for an hour.
Intensity sliderOne slider takes each theme from barely-there to full strength, so you can dial the effect to the exact room and screen you're reading on.
Instant, no reloadThe change lands the moment you flip the switch. No page reload, no re-opening the document.
Read aloudTwo voices: Robot uses your OS's built-in speech instantly, while Fluent is a neural voice (Kokoro-82M) that runs offline on your own CPU after a one-time download.
Selection or whole PDFRight-click Read aloud on any selected text, or send the entire document to the reader — text is extracted page by page, locally.
Preferences that follow youTheme, intensity, voice, and speed sync across your devices through your Chrome profile. Nothing is stored on a server.
Themes & read-aloudA calmer PDF viewer
PrivacyRuns on your machine
Everything runs on your machine.
Paperlight has no backend and asks for nothing about you. The neural voice works with the network off, and the extension never transmits the contents of your PDFs or your selected text anywhere.
No backendThere is no account, no analytics, no telemetry, and no server operated by the developer.
Nothing transmittedYour PDFs, your selected text, and your browsing never leave your machine. The Fluent voice turns text into audio locally.
One optional downloadThe only data that leaves your device is the one-time download of the speech model from Hugging Face — and only if you pick the Fluent voice.