The original note, as written at the time
TEXT READER FILES WITH EMBEDDED SOUND BYTES. A computer application with the allowance for users to insert special light sound bytes that aid people in the reading of text, aimed at making reading of reports and papers less boring. Rather than read-out-loud algorithms that try to read out whatever content you have in an often similarly boring way, this reader will not read out material for you but will send out small sounds.
Ongoing development
A reading application that lets a writer insert small, light sound bytes into a text, so that reading a long report is less boring.
Not read-aloud. That is the point, and it is a real distinction. Every current audio reader takes the whole document and narrates it, in the same flat voice, at the same pace, which is not less boring than reading — it is the same boredom delivered through the ears.
This is a reader that stays silent and occasionally makes a sound. A soft chime at the start of a section. A low tone where a figure is important. Something that marks the passage of a long argument the way a chapter break does in a book.
Sound is very good at marking structure and very bad at carrying content. We know this from music and we ignore it in documents. A page can be made legible in two seconds by typography; a document of forty pages cannot, but it can be made navigable by ear.
The authorial question is the interesting one. If the writer places the sounds, the document acquires a performance — a reading path the author intended. That is a new editorial act, closer to scoring than to writing, and it might be the thing that finally makes long reports tolerable.
The danger is gimmickry. A sound every paragraph is a metronome and a metronome is torture. The rule should be scarcity: a page should be able to hold at most one, and most pages should hold none.
A good document already has a rhythm. This only makes it audible.