Offline speech for when your voice comes and goes

A text-to-speech board for part-time AAC — built for autistic adults and teens whose speech is intermittent or unreliable.

Website · Privacy · FAQ / Support

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What Reed is

Tap a phrase tile or type a sentence, and your phone speaks it aloud — or shows it full-screen in large type when sound won't work. One screen, one job. No account, no sign-up, nothing to set up before you use it.

Reed exists because every mainstream symbol-grid AAC app is built for young children — cartoon avatars, "parental" account gates, kiddie vocabulary — which is infantilising for the adults who need it, so they abandon it. Reed is the adult-first, calm, offline version: the vocabulary is yours, the design treats you as an adult, and there is no content filter on your own words.

AAC is not the backup plan; it is the plan. Part-time use is the dominant, durable pattern for this population — not churn in progress. Reed protects the authoring path so the calm-state self can prepare phrases the crisis-state self can reach.

Who it's for

People whose speech is intermittent ("I can talk, but only sometimes"), unreliable (says things that don't match the intended meaning), or insufficient (fluent-sounding, still can't convey need) — most often autistic adults who go non-speaking during shutdown, overload, or exhaustion. The words used throughout are the field's own: part-time AAC, unreliable speech, non-speaking (not "non-verbal" — language is intact; only speech is unavailable).

Features

• Type to speak — a sentence spoken aloud instantly. When speech doesn't play, your words go up on screen in large type, so you're still in the conversation.
• A board you edit — large phrase tiles you rewrite to your own words. No fixed vocabulary and no content filter. A tile's short label and the sentence it speaks are two separate fields.
• Speak or show — say a phrase aloud, or hold it up full-screen in a shop, a car, a waiting room.
• Choose your voice — the text-to-speech voices already on your phone, with pitch and speed. Voice is identity; Reed never imposes one.
• Made for adults — no cartoons, no student framing, no parental gate. Zero motion, warm calm palettes, one-handed reach.
• Yours to keep — free, no account, works with no signal. Nothing to log in to, and no server that can be shut down.

Privacy

Reed's privacy claim is written to be checked, not taken on trust. (Full policy: reed.applander.io/privacy.)

• No INTERNET permission on Android. Reed's Android build ships without it. The OS enforces this and it's listed on the Play page before install — you can verify the central claim without installing Reed or trusting this document. A store privacy label is developer-declared; the permission list is a fact the platform holds.
• No accounts, no server, no analytics, no ads, no crash-reporting SDK. The phrases you write stay on your device; there is no server to send them to.
• Speech uses your device's own system TTS engine, and Reed only selects voices that declare they need no network. That engine is a separate app with its own identity and permissions — Reed can't inspect or control it, so it filters on the declaration rather than claiming to verify it.
• Cloud backup is off on Android (allowBackup="false" + explicit dataExtractionRules), so your board isn't copied to Google Drive. Moving to a new phone is a user-initiated export.
• iOS caveat: iOS offers no equivalent OS-enforced network guarantee, and Apple documents isExcludedFromBackup as guidance, not a promise. On iOS the claim rests on Reed having no network code.

Reed is a communication tool, not a medical device; it does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It is geo-restricted from the EU at launch (EU MDR Class I considerations for AAC software).

Tech stack

Flutter (Dart 3), Android-first with iOS support. Deliberately small.

Concern	Choice
Toolchain	Flutter 3.44.6 (pinned in .fvmrc; fvm optional)
State	flutter_riverpod 2.x — six plain providers, no codegen
Storage	drift (SQLite), device-only, foreign_keys on
Speech	flutter_tts behind a SpeechService seam, .playback audio session
Type	Atkinson Hyperlegible Next (variable), five fixed roles
Lints	very_good_analysis, promoted to errors, riverpod_lint

Architecture is layer-first for data (lib/data/, lib/native/, lib/model/) and surface-first for UI (lib/ui/board, show_text, edit, settings, core), two levels deep, no barrels. Deep dives live in docs/:

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — layers, providers, the speech seam
• docs/DESIGN_SYSTEM.md · docs/DESIGN_RATIONALE.md — the four palettes, tile anatomy, zero-motion
• docs/CODING_STANDARDS.md · docs/TESTING.md · docs/TOOLING.md
• docs/CHECKLIST.md — the on-device pre-release pass
• .claude/skills/ — the project's rules encoded as reviewable skills (colour, copy voice, privacy claims, speech, a11y…)
• epics/ — the roadmap, E01–E11

Getting started

# Flutter 3.44.6 (see .fvmrc). With fvm:  fvm install && fvm use
flutter pub get

# Generate drift + build_runner output (committed, but regenerate after schema edits)
dart run build_runner build --delete-conflicting-outputs

# Run on a connected device or simulator
flutter run

# The full suite — unit, widget, a11y, policy greps (~135 tests, <30s)
flutter test

Note: the iOS simulator runs debug/profile only — iOS release builds are AOT-compiled for physical devices. Android supports flutter run --release.

Project status

Reed is built in epics (see epics/). E01–E10 are complete (foundation, design system, data layer, speech, speak/show screens, edit mode, settings, portability, verification). E11 (release) is in progress: store paperwork and this public presence are done; signing, the obfuscation decision, and shipping to the first testers remain. Reed is not yet publicly downloadable — it's being tested with a small group first.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — especially from people who use AAC. See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, the coding standards, and how decisions are made, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. Security reports: SECURITY.md.

A note on positionality: the field's own guidance is that AAC users must be leaders and co-creators in anything about them, and names tokenism as a specific risk. This project does not claim lived experience it doesn't have. If you use AAC, your review carries weight here that a maintainer's cannot.

License

MIT © 2026 Zakaria Fatahi.

Open-sourcing is Reed's exit plan — an offline, account-free app has no server to shut down, and publishing the source is how it survives its developer. It is not offered as evidence for the privacy claims: the OS-enforced absence of the INTERNET permission is, and that is verifiable without the source.

Acknowledgements

• Atkinson Hyperlegible Next — Braille Institute, under the SIL Open Font License. (Developed and tested with low-vision readers; no independent peer-reviewed validation has been published.)
• Flutter, drift, Riverpod, flutter_tts, and the rest of the pub ecosystem — see pubspec.yaml.
• The autistic and AAC communities whose accounts shaped what Reed is and, just as much, what it refuses to be.