“Some struggling readers, or low-literacy readers, will read one word at a time,” Nicholas tells Quartz. “We’re nudging eye-movement patterns that good readers on their own have done naturally.” He says  the technology could also benefit strong readers when they’re tired or under stress  and could also improve their reading speeds.

And though Nicolas wouldn’t divulge its “secret sauce,” the extension appears, after a few days of testing, to add spaces  in front  of words like “and,” “to,” and “of,” breaking down sentences into digestible units, akin  to the effect  of punctuation  and paragraph breaks.

One drawback  to the technology  is that it won’t  be readily available on mobile devices, since their browsers don’t yet support extensions.