I've always found reading hard. Long documents slide off my attention, and I lose my place constantly. What I really wanted was something that would read to me and show me the words as it went — so my eyes and ears stayed in sync. Nothing did exactly that, so I built it.
It's called ReadAloud, it's on Google Play, and this post is the "why" and the interesting bits of the "how."
The moment it became real
The first person I showed a rough build to was my Sister, Praise. She'd come to town to officiate a Women's Premier League match at Auntie Aku Astro Turf Park, and I pulled out my phone between everything else. She watched a paragraph read itself aloud with each word lighting up and got genuinely excited — that was the push I needed. She became tester #1. My colleague Reggie became tester #2. Between them they found the rough edges I'd stopped seeing, and the app settled into something stable.
What it is
