Reading by Ear — a Guide for Visual Fatigue and Dyslexia
Some nights your eyes just can't track text anymore. Here's how to use Yomite's lock-screen controls, furigana karaoke highlighting, and adjustable playback to keep reading without relying on your eyes.
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.
Control it without looking at the screen
Yomite offers playback controls from the lock screen, Dynamic Island, and widgets, with 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 commands like “resume in Yomite” or “next chapter” work 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.
When you do want to see the text — furigana and karaoke highlighting
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, 10 font choices, adjustable letter spacing, line spacing, margins, and a night mode (amber tint) are all available, so you can tune the display to whatever is easiest on your eyes.
Playback speed and rewind, tuned to you
Adjust playback speed to whatever pace works for you. If you miss a line, a 10-second rewind gets you right back to it. Bookmarks and a sleep timer mean you can stop partway through and pick up exactly where you left off.
Synthesis runs entirely on-device
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’s free
The free tier already covers the reading essentials: the Mai and fumifumi voices, 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 more voice variety, Premium (a ¥1,980 one-time purchase — see pricing) unlocks 30+ additional voices.
We want to hear from you
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