I’m a fan of Firefox’s ‘Reader Mode’ feature, because it allows me to read web pages that use light text on dark backgrounds. My eyes have always been pretty good, but in recent years I’ve noticed that reading white text on a black background gives me blurry vision within a few minutes. All I have to do is click the Reader button, and I see a nice, clean view of the page, with black text on a white background.

Unfortunately, Firefox’s Reader mode is only available for some pages. I’ve yet to discern a pattern. For example, the home page of this site (boot13) doesn’t show the Reader button, but navigating to an individual post, or to one of the post archive pages or category pages does.

Luckily, I stumbled across a Firefox add-on that does what I want: Page Colors & Fonts Buttons. There’s not much to the add-on; it simply adds two buttons to the toolbar: one to toggle the default colours off and on, and another to toggle the default fonts off and on. It doesn’t give you the fancy view you get with Reader mode, but it does work on any page.

Any Firefox user who’s ever had trouble reading text on a web page should install this add-on. Highly recommended.