About this project
This is a reader for classical texts, built to work with no internet, no account, no ads and no tracking. The library ships with the app: once installed, the books are on your device.
It was made by an optician who does not see colour the way most people do, for an elderly father with low vision, and for two small children. Every setting here came from a real person failing to read something.
Which settings are right for me
This is the most useful part of this page.
No eye condition has a single recipe, and what follows are starting points, not prescriptions. The right setting is whatever feels comfortable once you try it — and trying is cheap: nothing here is permanent and nothing damages the text.
All settings live under the Ξ button, in APPEARANCE.
If you have low vision
Text size has no timid ceiling: you can reach one or two words per screen if that is what helps.
Text size: press the + in the top bar until the line feels comfortable; do not fear the extremes
Colours: start with Black on white or White on black — the two maximum-contrast pairs
Letter weight: Heavy
Line spacing: Wide
If white feels too strong, Yellow on black is usually the next one to try.
If you have presbyopia (age-related long sight)
The difficulty focusing up close that shows up in your forties. The text is sharp, but it demands distance.
Text size: one or two taps on the + in the top bar usually suffice
Colours: Sepia tires less than pure white over a long read
Letter weight: Medium
If you are short-sighted (myopic)
Near vision is often excellent. Many short-sighted people read best at small sizes with the device close to the face — and want more text on screen, not less.
Text size: shrink freely with −
Line spacing: Minimum
Letter weight: Light
If you have astigmatism
Here the blur has a direction: one orientation of stroke stays sharp and the other does not. In practice, letters seem to run into each other, and the thin parts of the letterform disappear.
Enlarging text helps less than you would expect. What usually works is a different pair:
Letter spacing: Wide or Extra wide — normally the single biggest change
Letter weight: Heavy, which restores the thin strokes you lose
Font: Atkinson Hyperlegible, with even strokes, suffers less than a serif with strong thick–thin contrast
If you have keratoconus
Along with irregular blur, it is common to see the same letter doubled with one eye alone — a second, offset copy that is not a focusing problem. When that copy falls slightly low, the ghost of one line lands on the next.
Line spacing: Wide — usually the decisive setting
Letter spacing: Wide
Letter weight: Heavy
Colours: if bright light bothers you, avoid pure white; Night blue or Petrol blue tend to weigh less
If you are colour blind
No information in this app is carried by colour alone. Right and wrong answers, active buttons, warnings: everything also carries a symbol or a word. You can use any colour scheme without losing anything.
If you have dyslexia
Font: OpenDyslexic, drawn with heavier letter bottoms
Letter spacing: Wide
Line spacing: Wide
One honest note: the scientific evidence for an objective reading-speed gain from dyslexia fonts is mixed. What is well reported is the preference of the people who use them. That is why it is an option here, never the default.
If bright light hurts (photophobia)
Colours: Night blue or Petrol blue — dark without being pure black
Lower your device brightness too. No theme compensates for a screen at full brightness in a dark room
What this app does not do
It does not examine, diagnose, or replace a consultation. If reading has become hard and you do not know why, that is a question for an eye doctor — especially if the difficulty appeared suddenly.
What it does is stay out of the way: people who know what they need can find the settings, and people who do not have somewhere to start.
How this was verified
None of it is the designer's opinion.
The contrast of every colour scheme is measured by a program that reads the colours from the published file — not from a typed copy — and calculates. All of them pass 7:1, the highest level of the international accessibility standard, rather than the 4.5:1 most sites use.
The same program simulates the three forms of colour blindness and measures whether two colours remain distinguishable from each other, not just against the background. That is how it was found that the yellow search highlight collapsed into the other highlight under tritanopia. It was changed to orange.
Fonts were chosen by counting the characters in each file, not by reading the documentation. That is how it was found that the font then used for the Greek alphabet book contained no Greek letters at all: precisely the letters the book exists to teach were being drawn by whatever font the device happened to have.
About the library
The texts are public domain, or translations made by this project. Every file declares its author, source language, translator, licence and provenance.
The corpus is multilingual — ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese and English — and nothing is translated on screen: each work stays in the language it was written in. A translation, here, is a new work with its own address.
The app asks for no account, shows no ads and tracks no one. It only counts visits, anonymously: how many times it was opened and which works were opened — no cookies, no record of your device's address, no idea who you are. The numbers are open to everyone on the [public dashboard](https://pedraangular.goatcounter.com). If your browser asks not to be tracked, the app does not count at all; and anyone who prefers to stay out of the count can open pedraangular.app.br/?contar=nao once on their device. It is you and the text.