You get to the bottom of a paragraph and realise you have absorbed none of it. Your eyes did their job. They tracked every line to the full stop. Somewhere around the sixth word, your attention quietly left the building, and nobody told your eyes to stop.
So you go back to the top and do it again. Sometimes three times. This is not a comprehension problem. You understand the words fine. It is an attention problem, and reading harder does not fix it.
The obvious answer is to have the page read to you. People try this, and most of them stop within a week. Plain audio has exactly the same failure mode as plain text. Nothing holds your place. You drift, you notice you drifted, and then you are dragging a progress bar backwards trying to find the sentence where you left.
Audio removes the effort of decoding. It does not give your attention anything to hold onto. That turns out to be the part that matters.
Hear the word and see the word, at the same moment. If you are listening to this page right now, the word being spoken is lit up on the screen in front of you, and the light is moving. Your ears do the reading. Your eyes get a job: follow the glow.
That is the whole mechanism. It sounds almost too simple to be worth building, but it is the difference between a tool people abandon and one they keep. When your attention wanders, and it will, you look back at the page and you are not lost. The highlight is already there, holding your place.
It is also why this works well for people with ADHD, and for dyslexic readers, and honestly for anyone at the end of a long day of screens. The moving target is easier to follow than a wall of grey text, and hearing a word while seeing it takes real pressure off.
This is ListenReader, and it reads whatever is already in front of you. An article like this one. A Google Doc. A PDF of a course reading. A long email thread you have been avoiding. There is nothing to import and no library to maintain, because a system you have to maintain is a system you will abandon by March.
You click once. It starts talking in about two seconds, while the rest of the page is still being prepared. If you switch tabs, it keeps going. If you close the tab, it still keeps going. Come back on Thursday and it will offer to continue from the exact word you stopped on.
It will not make you want to read the thing. Nothing can do that. What it removes is the friction of starting, and the small quiet defeat of reading a paragraph four times and taking in none of it.
You are at the end of this page. If you followed along without going back once, that was the point.