Reading by Ear: Guide for Visual Fatigue and Dyslexia
Read without relying on your eyes: Yomite's lock-screen controls, furigana karaoke highlighting and adjustable playback for tired-eye nights.
When your eyes are too tired to read, the simplest way to keep going is to listen instead. Yomite reads your books and web articles aloud with on-device voices and can be controlled from the lock screen, so you can keep listening without looking at the screen. When you do want to look, furigana and a highlight on the sentence being read help you follow along.
Related use case: Accessibility
Some nights, tracking text with your eyes is genuinely hard. For some readers with dyslexia, following characters on a page takes real effort every time. For readers with low vision, cranking up the font size only helps so much.
The desire to read is there — the eyes are the bottleneck. Here’s what Yomite can actually do about that.
Can I control it without looking at the screen?
Yomite offers playback controls from the lock screen, shows what is playing in the Dynamic Island, and has stable background playback. That means you can keep your phone in your pocket and listen without ever looking at the screen.
It also supports Siri and App Intents, so a command like “resume in Yomite” works by voice. Home Screen Quick Actions and the Lock Screen Action Button give you a couple more ways to control playback without staring at your device.
What if I still want to see the text?
You don’t have to choose ears-only. Yomite’s reader can display furigana over kanji, and the sentence currently being read is highlighted in a “karaoke” style that follows along. Tap anywhere to jump to a different position. You can mix eyes and ears depending on how you’re feeling.
Vertical or horizontal text layout, five Japanese fonts, adjustable letter spacing, line spacing, margins, and a warm amber night tint are all available, so you can tune the display to whatever is easiest on your eyes.
Can I change the speed or replay a line I missed?
Adjust playback speed to whatever pace works for you. If you miss a line, tap that sentence to hear it again. Bookmarks and a sleep timer mean you can stop partway through and pick up exactly where you left off.
Is it safe to listen to personal writing?
Yomite’s speech synthesis never touches the cloud — everything runs on-device. Text you load in never gets sent to an external server, which matters if you’re listening to something personal, like a journal entry or a draft you’re not ready to share.
What can I use for free?
The free tier already covers the reading essentials: every on-device voice (315+ Japanese voices) and up to 20 minutes of listening a day (15 minutes plus 5 from the daily check-in), EPUB / Aozora Bunko / web article playback, lock-screen controls, furigana and karaoke highlighting, adjustable speed, and the built-in pronunciation dictionary (read-only). If you want to listen longer, Premium removes the daily limit. It comes as a monthly or yearly subscription or a lifetime purchase (see pricing for details).
What if something doesn’t work for me?
If something about accessibility isn’t working well, or you have a suggestion, reach out at [email protected]. We’d rather tune the details based on how people actually use this.
— Yomite Team
Related: Reading screen settings: fonts, layout, night mode · Hands-free listening with Siri and the lock screen