Text Blackness

As we spend more and more time looking at the computer screen, it’s only natural to feel fatigued every once in a while. While looking away is probably the best remedy, sometimes you just can’t — maybe you’re working on something important, and a deadline is fast approaching, or you have an office job that involves using the computer for the better part of the day.

Text Blackness aims to deal with text readability by offering users greater control over its contrast and font size. It comes as a free-to-try browser extension for Chromium browsers, so it may just be something you’re looking for if you’re after a solution to improve text readability.

Squinting at text is hardly ideal, but sometimes there’s nothing else you can do. With this browser add-on, users can now modify the look of the text, and therefore enhance readability, leading to less eye strain.

Configuring text is easy enough: click the extension’s icon, and you’ll be able to modify the darkening of your text, as well as its font size and weight. There’s also a Color Forgivingness parameter, which seems to alter the contrast of colored text.

While the solution certainly managed to improve readability on my part, that only happened on some websites. For instance, only certain text would change on some domains, while other parts remained unchanged.

When that happened, body text would typically stay the same, with the extension only applying its changes to title or heading text. Perhaps it’s a webpage quirk more than anything, but it’s worth mentioning, nonetheless.

Text Blackness worked well and successfully managed to improve readability based on my needs. However, the presence of inconsistencies on some domains can make the extension feel unreliable at times.