Hello AppleVis Community,
I hope you are all doing well. I am writing to share an exciting personal journey and a project that I have recently started developing: Armoni (working title), a brand-new screen reader designed specifically for macOS.
Please note that this is an early-stage announcement—there is no downloadable build or app to share just yet. However, as the architecture and core navigation layers take shape, I wanted to reach out to this amazing community to share the vision, talk about the motivation behind it, and invite beta testers who might want to join me on this journey.
The Motivation & Vision
As someone who deeply values efficiency and intuitive workflow, I found myself longing for the familiar, object-oriented, and structured navigation paradigm found in Windows screen readers like JAWS, rather than being strictly bound to the native VoiceOver paradigm on macOS.
The goal with Armoni is not to replace VoiceOver entirely, but to provide an alternative, highly optimized environment built from the ground up to offer a seamless, fast, and predictable user experience—especially for power users coming from a Windows/screen reader background.
What We Are Building
Armoni is designed to be a comprehensive, cross-application accessibility solution covering the environments we use every day:
Web Browsing: Smooth virtual cursor navigation across modern browsers like Safari and Chrome.
Productivity: Native handling of office applications (Word, Excel, etc.).
Developer & AI Tools: Comprehensive support for tools like Xcode, Terminal interfaces, and modern AI developer workflows (Codex, Claude, etc.).
macOS System Integration: Deep integration with system apps, alerts, notifications, and shell elements.
Call for Testers
Before opening up a broader public beta, I am looking to build a small, dedicated core group of testers who can provide feedback on the early workflows, keyboard maps, and structural navigation behavior.
If you are a macOS user who is excited about a JAWS-like interaction model and wants to help shape the future of accessibility on the Mac, please leave a comment below or drop a brief note about your experience and the tools you use daily.
Thank you so much for reading, and I look forward to connecting with you all as this project grows!
Best regards,
UÄŸur
Comments
Re: Promising
Hello everyone,
When I began working on Armoni, I was not aware of TurnOver. Discovering it and having the opportunity to examine its approach and source code was a welcome surprise.
After considering what has already been achieved, we have decided to end Armoni’s current beta programme. There is already a promising, working open-source project here, and I believe helping it develop further could be the most useful way to contribute our time and experience.
I will contact Oliver to discuss whether and how we could support TurnOver. We would like to understand where our accessibility experience, testing, and development work could be useful, while respecting his plans for the project.
Our potential contribution would include hands-on engineering and human code review. Alongside AI-assisted development, we would involve backend developer colleagues at our company in reviewing and refining our proposed changes, with attention to reliability, maintainability, and code quality. We would explore this with them before making any specific commitments.
Thank you to everyone who tried Armoni, reported problems, questioned our approach, or offered encouragement. Your feedback helped us think more carefully about where our effort could make the greatest difference.
Uğur Gürbüz