How Helperbird Makes Everyday Web Browsing Easier for Seniors

The text on most websites is smaller than it needs to be.

Bank pages, news sites and health portals each pick their own text size, their own grey and their own cramped layout. You do not have to accept any of it.

Two ways to make things bigger

Both of these zoom the whole page, so buttons, photos and form boxes grow along with the words. What separates them is how far each one goes.

Font size sits in the Text settings panel. It has six steps: Extra small, Small, Medium, Large, Extra large and Maximum. Extra small leaves the page exactly as it was, and Maximum is a tenth bigger. See how to change the font size on any website.

Magnifier sits in the Display panel and moves on a slider instead of steps. It reaches far past what Font size can do. See how to zoom in and magnify any website.

Make the page easier to see

High contrast gives you five looks to choose from: Increased Contrast, Greyscale, Inverted Color, Inverted Greyscale and Yellow on Black. Increased Contrast is the gentlest place to start.

Dark Reader is a separate control. It paints a dark palette over the page in one of four themes: Dark, Dim, Midnight or Slate. You also get sliders for brightness, contrast, sepia and grayscale. Use one or the other, not both.

Cursor size makes the pointer bigger, so you can find it again after you look away. Highlight links draws a colored bar under every link, which helps on sites that print links in the same grey as the text.

Font swaps a site's lettering for one of 32 fonts, including Atkinson Hyperlegible and Lexend Deca. On iPad and iPhone you get 29 of them. Whichever you pick, the lines are spaced further apart at the same time.

Listen instead of reading

On a tired-eye day, listening is a real alternative. Open Text to speech and press Play. Select a paragraph first and it reads only that. With nothing selected it reads the article it finds on the page. Where there is no article, it cannot get text at all.

The same panel holds the voice list and the playback speed. Standard Voices come from your own browser and cost nothing. Neural Voices are marked Pro. The steps are in how to use text to speech on any website.

Cut the clutter, the glare and the movement

Reading Mode rebuilds an article on a clean page with the sidebars and adverts gone. See how to use Reading Mode on any website.

Color overlay lays a color you pick over the page and lets you set how strong it is. If white pages feel like glare to you, start there.

Reduce motion cuts most of the sliding and fading, so the page settles instead of moving while you read.

A comfortable starting point

Set Font size to Large, turn on Cursor size and pick one High contrast theme. If Large is still too small, add Magnifier. Then pin what worked to Quick actions, so it is waiting for you when you sit down tomorrow.

For a wider list, see the roundup of free accessibility tools for seniors browsing the web.

What needs Helperbird Pro

Neural Voices need Helperbird Pro. So do the keyboard shortcuts for High contrast and Color overlay, though both toggles are free.

Everything else named on this page is free, and free needs no account and no password.

What it does not do

• Reading Mode cannot rebuild every page. Where it finds no article it says Not supported on this page.
• Reading Mode, Font and Font size do not run on PDFs or on Google Docs.
• Font leaves icons alone, so some buttons keep their own symbols.
• High contrast changes the colors of most pictures too, not only the text.
• Dark Reader does not work in Helperbird's PDF Reader.
• Reduce motion cannot stop every kind of movement. Some picture carousels keep sliding.

Get Helperbird

The everyday tools are free. Helperbird Pro adds the rest. You turn it on with email login or a subscription key.

See the Helperbird browser extension or compare the Helperbird plans.