One Friday, while I was reading Surat Al-Kahf as I usually do, an old question came back to me — one that had nagged at me for a long time: why isn’t reading the Quran on a phone easier and smoother, especially for those of us who depend on screen readers every day? As a blind person who uses VoiceOver on the iPhone, my repeated attempts to read my daily portion kept running into apps that treated accessibility as an afterthought — until I was spending more time figuring out the interface and hunting for unlabeled buttons than actually reciting.
There were two core reasons for this. First, in many of these apps the Mushaf is shown as an image — and since a screen reader can’t read images, the text of the Quran stays completely hidden from a blind reader. Second, some apps present the text only in the Uthmani script, which screen readers can’t pronounce correctly, so they stumble over the words. On top of that, some apps are simply hard to move through: weak accessibility, a tangled navigation structure, and design choices that favor sighted users over the blind — the focus is on how it looks more than on whether it truly works, until turning a single page becomes a burden.
I tried reaching out to some of the developers to improve things, but nothing really changed. I came to see that real solutions need someone who lives accessibility and experiences it firsthand — not someone who patches it on at the end.
So I decided to build the app myself, with accessibility as the foundation from the very first line of code, not something tacked on at the end. The core difference I insisted on is that the Mushaf here is real, precise, readable text — not a silent image. And to solve the Uthmani-script problem, the app keeps the authentic Uthmani script (the King Fahd Complex Mushaf) on screen, while letting the screen reader pronounce every verse clearly and correctly — so sighted readers keep the beauty of the Uthmani script, and blind readers get an accurate one. Moving between pages, surahs, and juzʼ became effortless. And although it started as a fix for a personal problem, I didn’t design it for blind users alone; I built it so anyone can use it with ease, sighted or blind. When accessibility is the foundation of a design, the whole experience becomes better and clearer for everyone.
I made sure the app brings together what genuinely helps through the day, without the clutter. Here’s some of what it offers:
- Read the entire Mushaf as real text, based on the King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex, with easy navigation between pages, surahs, and juzʼ.
- Listen to recitations by a range of reciters, with downloads for listening offline.
- Tafsir, the meanings of unusual words (gharib), and the reasons for revelation (asbab al-nuzul).
- Track your daily wird and your khatma, so you always know where you left off.
- Save your place with bookmarks.
- Search the text of the Quran and the tafsir.
- Morning and evening athkar with a counter.
- Prayer times and the Qibla direction, with reminders.
- Share a direct link to a specific page, surah, or juzʼ.
- Sync your data across your devices.
My hope is simply that it’s accepted, and that it accompanies you through your day, bringing you that calm, easy reading. It would mean a lot to have you share this journey with me — the app is now on the App Store.