Building a Minimal Text-to-Speech Reader for iOS
A small MVP journey: turning long, difficult-to-read documents into a simple listening experience.
The problem
Useful information is often trapped inside PDFs. Reading long documents on a small screen can be tiring, especially for people with dyslexia, ADHD, or visual difficulties.
The solution
I built Textway Reader, an iOS app that imports a text-based PDF or TXT file, extracts its text, and reads it aloud with the device's system voice. It also saves reading progress so users can continue later.
How I built it
The interface uses SwiftUI, PDFKit handles PDF text extraction, AVSpeechSynthesizer provides on-device text-to-speech, and Codable storage keeps document metadata and progress local to the device.
I kept the first version deliberately small: no accounts, cloud sync, OCR, subscriptions, or server-based voices. This made the complete reading journey easy to build and test in the iOS Simulator.
Result
The MVP successfully imports a selectable-text PDF, plays it aloud, pauses and resumes from the saved position, and starts completed documents again from the beginning. I also added clear playback states, Dynamic Type support, and VoiceOver labels.
The main lesson was simple: a useful MVP does not need many features. It needs one important journey that works reliably.