Kira's Web-Treehouse for Plants 🌱

& Other Wayward Beings

👁️ Eye Accessibility Hacks

Since February 2025 my eyes started experiencing great pain if I use them for more than a short period of time. As a result, I've had to keep my eyes closed for > 80% of each day.

It's been incredibly difficult, frustrating, and lonely. I hope it improves some day. One result of this disability is that I stopped being able to read websites or even local files like text files and PDFs. I'm mostly only able to take in audio, but I can handle very short bits of text, like instant messages or brief emails. I really wanted a way to still enjoy articles and other writings.

Using my limited daily eyesight, I slowly researched & then hacked together some programs to build utilities for myself that enable me to read PDFs and websites without needing my eyes: by turning them into audio I can listen to.

It felt really important to me to use local-first (no cloud crap), open source software. A lot of the older open source text-to-speech programs were not very good, and too difficult for me to understand.

Whisper has a really good synthesizer, but it takes my computer a LONG time to generate any audio. I eventually found Mozilla's TTS, which has a good generation time trade-off against quality.

I run Debian Linux, so some of the notes below may need to be adjusted to your system.

pdftotext

Converts a PDF to plain text.

The program comes with the poppler-utils package on Debian.

Invoke as

pdftotext quux.pdf -

to write the resultant text to stdout.

readability-scrape

Converts a URL into plain text.

https://github.com/aarmea/readability-scrape

This is a small Node.js program that uses Mozilla's Readability.js library (same thing Reader View in Firefox uses) to extract just the article text, given a website URL.

Invoke as

readability-scrape $URL

and it will write the text to stdout.

Mozilla TTS

Converts plain text to an WAV audio file.

https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/tree/dev#install-tts

I needed to install Python 3.10.x specifically for it to work properly, despite what the installation instructions say. I used pyenv for this.

I also to ensure certain system packages were installed:

After it's installed, here's how I invoke it:

tts --text \"$TEXT\" --out_path audio.wav

Caveats

  1. TTS mispronounces words frequently! I find it mostly manageable because my brain can figure it out from context.

  2. TTS sometimes will glitch out and speak gibberish for several seconds (or minutes). This is an annoying bug, made less annoyance by how hilarious it tends to be.

Tying it all together: lesen

I wrote a bash script called lesen (German for "to read"), which takes plain text on stdin, writes the audio to a specified file, and starts up a media player playing it when it's done.

e.g.

pdftotext rfc9110.pdf | lesen rfc.ogg

This will turn the PDF text into audio (as a WAV file), transcode it to OGG (much much smaller), and starts up the MPV media player playing it.

The script depends on a few programs:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

if [[ $# -ne 1 ]]; then
  echo "USAGE: $0 OUT < FILE"
  exit 1
fi

TEMP_OUT=$(mktemp)

TEXT=""
while read line; do
  TEXT+="$line"
done

# Escape any double quotes.
TEXT="$(echo $TEXT | sed 's/"/\\"/g')"

tts --text \"$TEXT\" --out_path $TEMP_OUT 2> /dev/null > /dev/null"
ffmpeg -i $TEMP_OUT $1
rm $TEMP_OUT
mpv --pause $1