Nuvora Reading Time & Progress Bar is a lightweight, developer-friendly plugin that adds two things readers love:

A reading time badge — shown before/after your post content.
A scroll progress bar — a sleek bar at the top (or bottom) of the screen that fills as the reader scrolls.

✨ What makes it different?

AI-assisted reading time adjustment
Posts with lots of headings, bullet lists, and short paragraphs are scanned faster by readers. The plugin detects structure in your content and intelligently reduces the estimate — labelled “AI-adjusted” so readers know.

Per-post overrides via meta box
Override the calculated reading time for any post. Hide the badge or progress bar per-post, right from the editor.

Accessibility-first design
– Semantic role="progressbar" with live aria-valuenow updates
– Meaningful aria-label on every element
– Keyboard-focusable progress bar
– Fully respects prefers-reduced-motion
– Screen-reader-friendly badge with word count in ARIA label

Minimal & performant
– No jQuery dependency (vanilla JS)
– No external assets, fonts, or CDN calls
– No database writes beyond settings
– No user tracking whatsoever
– ~1.5 KB JS / ~1.2 KB CSS (gzipped)

Elementor Widget included
– Drag and drop the Reading Time widget directly in Elementor
– Full widget controls for badge display and styling
– Works seamlessly with Elementor’s responsive settings

Developer-friendly
– Template tags: rte_the_reading_time(), rte_get_reading_time()
– Filters: rte_badge_html, rte_show_badge, rte_ai_adjustment_factor
– CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) content support
– Per-post type configuration

📐 Settings

Custom WPM (words per minute) — default 238
Enable/disable AI-assisted adjustment
Badge position: before content, after content, or both
Choose which post types show the badge and/or progress bar
Customise badge label text (use {time} placeholder)
Pick progress bar color, height (1–10 px), position (top/bottom)
Optional percentage tooltip on hover
Respect prefers-reduced-motion toggle

🔧 Template Tags

Use in your theme:

<?php rte_the_reading_time(); // echoes "5 min read" ?>

<?php $data = rte_get_reading_time(); echo $data['minutes']; ?>

🪝 Filters

Customise badge HTML:
add_filter( ‘rte_badge_html’, function( $html, $result ) { return $html; }, 10, 2 );

Disable badge conditionally:
add_filter( ‘rte_show_badge’, ‘__return_false’ );

Tweak AI adjustment factor (0.75–1.0):
add_filter( ‘rte_ai_adjustment_factor’, function( $factor, $html ) { return 0.85; }, 10, 2 );