Timber reads any article, book, PDF, or pasted text aloud, in natural voices that live on your iPhone. A teacher built it after watching a student struggle to read a page. No account, nothing to buy to start — and not one word sent to a server.
“A young child asked me about the news — then struggled to read the article we pulled up. With friends, we built the app we always wanted: the best free vocal reader for iOS.”
— A teacher · California
Timber began as an accessibility tool — a teacher trying to help students who found reading hard. So reading-first features are not a settings-screen afterthought. They are the point, and they are free.
It works with the accessibility tools you already use, and goes further with reading tools built for people who find text hard.
| VoiceOver throughout | Hundreds of spoken labels — every control announces itself, and the whole app is navigable by ear. |
| Dynamic Type | Reading surfaces scale with your system text size, up to the largest accessibility sizes. |
| Reduced Motion | Switch off motion in iOS and Timber's animations stand down to simple fades. |
| High Contrast | Turn on Increase Contrast and Timber answers with bolder, higher-contrast colours. |
| Light & dark | Follows your system appearance, with warm reading palettes for long sittings. |
| Listen, don't squint | At its core Timber reads aloud — with word-by-word highlighting so you can follow along. |
Each change is grounded in how dyslexic readers actually read, and you can keep any of them on without the others.
- A dyslexia-friendly typeface — OpenDyslexic, weighted at the bottom so letters are harder to flip, mirror, or swap.
- Bold letter anchors — the first letter of every word is bolded, giving the eye a fixed point to land on. Works across Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian scripts.
- Looser letter spacing — a little more air between letters so they stop crowding into each other.
- Looser line spacing — more room between lines makes it easier to keep your place down the page.
- A calming amber tint — an optional warm overlay, around 590 nm, that softens the glare some readers get from black text on a bright white page.
Accessible by default. None of this sits behind a paywall. No account, no required subscription — the full dyslexia mode, VoiceOver support, Dynamic Type, and the read-aloud reader are all free, and stay useful without ever paying. Accessibility that costs extra isn't accessibility.
Private — What you read stays on your phone. Complete — Reads the whole page, not half. Generous — Free features everywhere. Extras if you want.
Your open tabs, turned into a listening queue. Timber Tabs gathers the pile of
tabs you keep meaning to read — across Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc
and Opera — groups them by site, and pre-selects the ones that actually read like
articles. Keep what you want, then send the list straight to Timber or save a
portable .timberlist file.
Everything happens on your Mac — Timber Tabs never contacts a server. It reads only the titles and addresses of your tabs, never their contents.
This repository is the public home for Timber — report bugs, request features, and talk about the app here.
| 🐛 Report a bug | Something broke? File it on the Issues tab |
| 💡 Request a feature | Ideas and requests go in Issues too |
| 💬 Discussions | Questions, tips, and general chat |
| 👥 r/TimberReader | The Timber community on Reddit |
| 🌐 timberreader.com | The app, the story, the voices, how it works |
| 🔒 Privacy | What Timber does and does not send off your device |
| ♿ Accessibility | The accessibility work, in detail |
The Releases tab hosts Timber's neural voice and model bundles, which the app downloads on demand. Each bundle keeps its upstream license; the full list is on the in-app About page.
Private by default. Local-first. Your text stays yours.
Coming to the App Store · for iOS 18 and later
© Timber · timberreader.com