⭐ star — Speaking Terminal Access Reader

star is an accessible, GUI-first document reader with built-in text-to-speech. It opens PDFs, Word/EPUB/PowerPoint, web pages, spreadsheets, and more, reads them aloud, and highlights each word as it is spoken — with no cloud account and no internet required.

star is built for students with print disabilities — people who work with dense, heavily formatted documents and need a reading tool that gets out of the way. The Qt GUI is the primary interface (it launches by default and is where development is focused), with a keyboard shortcut for every command; a full-featured, keyboard-driven curses terminal UI remains available with --tui for headless or text-only environments.

It draws design inspiration from Emacspeak, Kurzweil 1000, Natural Reader, and Central Access Reader.

🚀 Install

On any platform with Python 3.11+:

pipx install star-reader      # isolated app install (recommended)
# or
pip install star-reader       # into the current environment

Then run it:

star                 # launch the Qt GUI
star document.pdf    # open a file
star --tui           # force the terminal UI
star --deps          # show which optional features are installed

Add optional features with extras — pip install "star-reader[all]" for the full feature set (everything except the multi-GB Whisper/Torch dictation stack, which is [transcribe]), or groups like star-reader[translate,vocab]. Full instructions (wheel, single-file star.pyz, native engines, per-platform notes) are in the Installation guide.

✨ Highlights

• Reads aloud with live word highlighting in both the Qt GUI and the terminal TUI — including in-process eSpeak-NG with true audio-position sync.
• Many TTS engines: pyttsx3 (SAPI5 / NSSpeechSynthesizer), macOS say, eSpeak-NG, Festival, Piper (neural, offline, free), Coqui, and DECtalk.
• Opens almost anything: PDF (incl. OCR), DOCX, PPTX, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, spreadsheets, DAISY/DTBook, and dozens more formats.
• Study tools: notes & annotations, a citation manager, summarization, Anki flashcard export, document translation (15 languages, no API key), RSS/Atom feed reading, and a difficult-word overlay.
• Knowledge graph: link annotations across documents with typed relations (CONFLICTS_WITH, SUPPORTS, CITES, …), extract concepts, view the graph interactively, and export to SVG/PlantUML/DOT/JSON.
• Export: Markdown, HTML, EPUB, PDF (with highlights), BRF braille, TTS audio (WAV/MP3/OGG/MP4), karaoke video (MP4), Anki decks, and synchronized SRT/VTT subtitles.
• Extensible: TTS engines, document formats, and export targets are discovered through importlib.metadata entry-points — installing a third-party plugin package adds backends, loaders, or exporters with no changes to star itself.
• Accessibility-first: NVDA/JAWS/Orca/VoiceOver compatible, four colorblind-friendly themes + custom CSS themes, dyslexia-friendly font, bionic reading, adjustable spacing (WCAG 1.4.12), and high-DPI support.
• Graceful degradation: every third-party dependency is optional and guarded, so the core runs on the Python standard library alone.

See the full feature reference for everything.

📚 Documentation

➡️ Browse all docs in the docs/ directory.

📦 Distribution

The pure-Python wheel (pip install star-reader) is star's primary, stable distribution and the only artifact produced by automated releases; it works on macOS, Linux, and Windows alike. A single-file star.pyz zipapp and the self-contained Windows star.exe (deprecated) are build-it-yourself — they are no longer shipped with releases. See Installation and BUILD.md.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome — please open an issue before a PR for anything beyond small fixes. Keep every third-party dependency optional and guarded, target Python 3.11, and document new keybindings and M-x commands. See Architecture & Contributing for the full guidelines and how to run the test suite.

📜 License

star — Speaking Terminal Access Reader Copyright 2026 Jon Pielaet

Free software under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty. See the LICENSE file, or run M-x license in the app, for the full text.