---
title: The reader
description: A reference for the player surface — controls, word highlight, and scroll-following.
category: reading
order: 1
last_verified_at: 2026-04-29
status: published
---

# The reader

The reader is the page where the voice and the words meet. It
has a player at the top and a column of prose below. This page
is the reference for everything that happens on that surface.

## The player

The player is a small bar with the controls in plain order: skip
back, play or pause, skip forward, and a few quieter affordances
for speed and voice. The bar lives at the top of the reading
column on desktop and at the bottom on small screens. It does not
float and it does not chase you.

## The word highlight

While the voice is speaking, the current word is gently
highlighted in a soft warm wash. The highlight moves smoothly
from word to word — the eye can stay on the page and follow
without effort.

The wash is a color, not a marker. It is meant to be ignorable
when you would rather just listen, and present when you would
rather follow along.

## Scroll-following

The reading area follows the spoken word so the current line
stays near the top of your view. If you scroll on your own —
because you want to look ahead, or back at something you missed
— the reader stops following until you ask it to again. A small
"follow narrator" prompt appears so you can rejoin without
hunting for it.

## Click a word to jump

Tapping or clicking any word in the prose moves the voice to
that word. The reader re-aligns and continues from there. This
is the fastest way to scrub backward over a line you missed or
forward past a section that no longer interests you.

## Speed

The speed control is a small range slider. Pull it left for
slower reading; pull it right to hurry through. Half a dozen
preset speeds cover the common range. The voice character stays
the same at every speed.

## Pause and resume

The reader pauses gracefully on tab close, on a phone call, on
any other audio interrupting. When you come back, you start from
where you left off — not the beginning of the chunk, the word
itself.

## What if the voice gets ahead of the words

The voice and the highlight are anchored to the same word
positions. They cannot drift apart on their own. If you ever see
them out of sync, that is a bug — please report it on the issue
tracker so we can fix it.