Built to be heard
Hark is the news, out loud. This page is for readers who take in the world the same way.
What Hark is
Hark turns the email newsletters you already choose into a personal five-minute morning newscast, read by a professional-sounding anchor and delivered as a text message at the time you pick. You wake up, your briefing is waiting, you press play.
Why Hark works by ear
Hark wasn’t retrofitted for accessibility. It’s an audio product by design, which means the core experience asks nothing of your eyes:
- The news itself arrives as audio: a newscast, not a wall of text.
- Delivery is a plain text message, which your screen reader already reads perfectly.
- One tap plays it. No app to install, no feed to navigate, no visual interface required.
- Your briefing opens with your local weather: the practical morning information that matters most before you head out the door.
If you can receive a text and tap a link, you can use Hark. That’s the whole interface.
The question that started it
The father of one of our family friends had a stroke and lost his sight. Among everything else it took, it took something he’d done every day of his life: keeping up with the news. Our friend went looking for a good way for him to listen to the news he actually cared about, and couldn’t find one that worked well. She knew what I was building and asked me, plainly:
“Could Hark work for him?”
That question changed my priorities. I stopped treating accessibility as a feature for later and started treating it as the point. This page, and a lot of the last month of work, exists because of it.
How I built and tested it
I’m Cooper. I built Hark, and I wanted it to work properly for blind users: not approximately, properly. So I learned VoiceOver myself. I turned on Screen Curtain and went through my own product entirely by ear: signed up, picked my newsletters, set my delivery time, listened to a briefing, took the quiz: eyes closed, gestures only.
Every place I got lost, or heard something wrong, or had to guess, became a fix. A few of the receipts:
- Every screen is navigable by headings; you can rotor through the whole product.
- Every action gets a spoken confirmation: “We sent a code.” “Payment confirmed: your subscription is active.” You never act into silence.
- Links and sentences read as single clean stops, not fragments stitched across elements.
- Where iOS’s native controls have quirks, we kept the native behavior you already know rather than inventing custom widgets you’d have to relearn.
Where we honestly are
Hark has been tested extensively by me, with VoiceOver on an iPhone. It has not yet been tested by enough people who use a screen reader every day, which is exactly why this page exists. I know the difference between a developer who learned VoiceOver last year and someone who’s lived in it for a decade.
If something is rough, I want to know. NVDA and JAWS users on desktop are especially welcome; that’s our current frontier.
An offer, and a request
If you’re a blind or visually impaired reader willing to try Hark and tell me what’s broken, or what’s brilliant: your premium account is free for one year. No forms, no program to enroll in. Just email me:
I read and answer everything myself.
Hear it for yourself
The fastest way to judge Hark is to listen to it. Today’s real briefing is public: no signup, no account, no email address.
Found an accessibility problem anywhere on Hark? Same email, cooper@hark.news, and I’ll fix it.