⭐ 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
star --install-optional       # fetch optional features from the command line

Optional features

star runs out of the box on nothing but the Python standard library, and grows on demand. On first launch the GUI shows a short optional-features chooser: pick the Thin or All preset, or tick exactly the capabilities you want (OCR, offline dictionary, summarize, translate, knowledge-graph extras, …), and star fetches the Python packages in the background — best-effort, once per machine. Re-open it any time from Tools → Install Optional Features…. The very large packs (speech-to-text dictation, named-entity extraction) stay opt-in, so All never triggers a multi-gigabyte download.

Prefer the command line or a scripted setup? star --install-optional installs the all preset; star --install-optional thin or star --install-optional ocr,dictionary install a preset or a comma-separated list of features; run it with no value to list every feature with its size. You can also install extras yourself the classic way — pip install "star-reader[all]" (everything except the multi-GB Whisper/Torch dictation stack, [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.
• Runs out of the box, grows on demand: a first-run chooser (or star --install-optional) fetches only the optional features you pick, in the background — nothing to configure before your first document.
• Clear, consistent UI: an all-icon toolbar with descriptive tooltips (vector glyphs drawn programmatically and tinted to your theme — no image files); a readable welcome page that reads aloud like any document; and F1 opens the bundled README as a document on every install.

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.