One way to reduce the background noise of a website is to highlight the current paragraph that you are 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 backgrounds.

Several keyboard shortcuts are added to make the paragraph navigation as fluid as possible. 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, and without the need to hold down the Ctrl key.

The extension works surprisingly well but it tends to catch a few paragraphs that do not belong to the article. Those are usually located at the beginning or end of an article, so that it should not be a huge problem for the majority of 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.