Easy on the Ears, Easy on the Eyes — Customizing Yomite's Reading Screen
Yomite is a TTS reader you can also watch while it reads. Vertical and horizontal layouts, 10+ fonts, kerning, line spacing, margins, and an amber night mode — here's how to tune the free-tier display settings to your eyes.
Yomite reads aloud, but it isn’t built only for closed-eyes listening. Its reader is designed for a “listen while you watch” mode too — with furigana readings and karaoke-style highlighting on screen — and the display itself can be tuned in detail: vertical or horizontal layout, font, kerning, line spacing, margins, and an amber night mode. Here’s what each setting does.
Vertical or horizontal — matched to what you’re reading
Yomite’s reader supports both vertical (tategaki) and horizontal (yokogaki) layouts. Classic Aozora Bunko literature and older novels in literary Japanese tend to feel more natural in vertical layout, while web articles and technical text usually read more comfortably horizontally. Switching between the two, depending on what you’ve imported, is a small change that makes a real difference once you try it.
10 fonts to choose from
A readable font is a personal thing. Yomite ships with 10 font choices, from crisp mincho-style faces to rounder, softer letterforms — so you can pick whichever is easiest on your eyes. If you tend to watch the screen while listening for extended stretches, this choice directly affects how tired your eyes get.
Fine-tune kerning, line spacing, and margins
Beyond the font itself, you can adjust kerning, line spacing, and margins. Widen the line spacing if text feels cramped, or tighten the margins if you want more text visible per screen. If you’re using karaoke highlighting — where the sentence currently being read is highlighted on screen — a bit of extra line spacing makes it easier to track which line is playing.
Amber night mode for reading before bed
Yomite includes a night mode that switches the screen to an amber color scheme. A bright white background is harsh in a dark room; amber tones soften that. It’s meant for the moments when you want to glance at the screen occasionally while listening right before sleep.
Pairs naturally with furigana and karaoke highlighting
These display settings are designed to work together with furigana readings and karaoke highlighting. Furigana appears as small readings above kanji, and karaoke highlighting tracks the currently-read sentence in real time. If you run into a kanji you don’t recognize, glancing at the screen alongside listening is the fastest way to confirm it. For more on that pairing, see the furigana and karaoke highlighting guide.
Why this matters for visual fatigue
For anyone prone to visual fatigue, being able to tune the display instead of living with fixed text size and colors makes a real difference over long sessions. An app that lets you adjust font, spacing, and color scheme feels very different to use for an hour than one that doesn’t. If visual fatigue or dyslexia is part of why you’re reading by ear, see the Reading by Ear accessibility guide for more.
Where to find these settings
Open the reader screen and tap the display settings icon to reach the vertical/horizontal toggle, font picker, sliders for kerning/line spacing/margins, and the night mode switch. You can change any of these mid-book, and your choices are remembered the next time you open the reader.
All of this is free
Everything covered here — the vertical reader, furigana, and karaoke highlighting — is available in Yomite’s free tier. Yomite currently offers two voices (Mai and fumifumi), fully offline AI narration, and every reader feature for free. Additional voices (30+) and iCloud sync unlock with Premium (a one-time purchase, currently a launch-price ¥1,980), but the display customization itself isn’t gated behind that purchase.
Wrapping up
Yomite isn’t only a listening app — its reader is built for the moments you want to watch as well as listen. Combine vertical/horizontal layout, one of 10 fonts, kerning/line-spacing/margin adjustments, and night mode, and you can shape a reading screen that’s easy on your particular eyes. Speech synthesis still runs entirely on-device, so none of the text you bring in leaves your phone.
— Yomite Team