It is sometimes hard to concentrate on reading an article because of all the background noise on that website. That is especially true for long articles or articles on websites that like to bombard their visitors with lots of interactivity, say a video playing, music, advertising banners and colors.
One way to reduce the background noise of a website is to highlight the current paragraph the user is reading. Enter Paragrasp, a Firefox extension that can mark the active paragraph with a background color making it easier to identify the active paragraph and reduce the chance of loosing the concentration.
The default color for highlighting a paragraph is yellow but it can be changed to another color which might be useful depending on the background color of the website. Yellow feels fine however on most websites because most tend to use light colors for their background.
Several keyboard shortcuts are added to ease the paragraph navigation. Pressing CTRL Down on the keyboard selects the next paragraph while CTRL UP selects the previous one. Once a paragraph has been highlighted the mouse wheel can be used to scroll up or down.
The shortcut Control Shift A enables arrow only navigation which then allows navigation with the up and down keys only.
The extension works surprisingly well but it tends to catch a few paragraphs that do not belong to the article. Those usually at the beginning or end of the article which should not be a huge problem for most users. The mouse wheel navigation works pretty nicely especially scrolling down, scrolling up seems to need improvement because it scrolls per line and not per paragraph.
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If I need to read something really long in the browser I usually disable layout and enlarge text to take whole screen. Makes it much more comfortable than tiny font in column (that is barely 1/4th of screen width on some sites).
@Rarst I often do that when the page has either too confusing of a font or has distractions elsewhere on the page.