Tapping “shine” in Julia Meets Toby: a bar under sh, an arc joining i and e, a dot under n. Image: Yara Reads.

Stories made only of words a new reader can sound out, with the sounds one tap away when they get stuck.

Eli Finer built Yara Reads for his six-year-old daughter. She had moved through the basic phonics with Teach Your Monster to Read and found it repetitive, and she wanted stories but still needed help sounding words out. His Show HN post says he wanted her to have the experience of sitting and reading by herself.

The help lives on the word. Tap one and its sounds appear: a dot under a single letter, a bar under a pair like sh or ee, an arc joining a split vowel like i_e. A speaker button lights each sound in turn, then says the word. It never reads the page for her.

The checker is the point. Each story is tested word by word against the sounds a child has learned, by pronunciation rather than spelling, so “cake” fails until the split a is taught. Parents can switch sounds and tricky words on or off, and a word with an unlearned sound gets a dotted underline.

The library is seven books of one series, Julia and Toby, in which a girl finds a white dragon with pink, green and blue scales crying under a tree. The plot is by Eli’s twelve-year-old son, Tom. The text and pictures are by Eli, and the credits say with AI help.

Limits are plain. It is built on English phonics, and seven books go quickly. The sound recordings are Eli’s own voice and are not in the repository, so anyone who self-hosts gets silent tiles until they record their own.

It is free, and the whole reader works without an account. An account is needed only to connect an AI agent through MCP, which can write stories inside your child’s sounds or type in books you own, private to you. The code is MIT, and the stories and pictures are CC BY 4.0.