Now launching: Candela — Techempower.org's free, offline neural audiobook reader for our entire library of digital-equity guides. Listen on Android, hands-free, with zero tracking.
What is Candela?
Candela is Techempower.org's accessible resource app — a content reader and audiobook player that brings our guides (plus 20+ other content sources like Royal Road, GitHub, Wikipedia, and more) to your ears, fully offline.
Why this matters: our mission is technology for all. But guides require reading — which excludes folks who are visually impaired, have low literacy, learn better by listening, or are driving, cooking, or otherwise hands-busy. Candela bridges that gap.
What's inside
- 🎙️ Offline neural text-to-speech — Piper, Kokoro, or KittenTTS voices on-device. No cloud, no API keys, no billing.
- 📖 Sentence-level reader/audio sync — see each sentence highlight as it's read aloud
- 🏠 Dedicated Techempower.org panel — every guide we publish, with a direct link to our peer-support Discord and 211 local services
- 🤖 Per-book AI chat — ask questions about what you're reading across 7 LLM providers
- ♿ WCAG AA accessibility — high-contrast theme, large touch targets, screen-reader friendly
- ⚡ Cold launch under a second on modest hardware
- 🆓 No tracking, no ads, no in-app purchases. Open source.
How to install
Sideload the APK from github.com/techempower-org/candela/releases — requires Android 8.0+, about 140 MB.
Sideloading keeps the current pre-1.0 builds fully free, fully offline, and beholden to no platform gatekeeper. A Play Store release is planned for the v1.0 milestone — same app, same privacy, just an easier on-ramp.
How it connects to Techempower.org
Candela pulls our guides directly from the Notion content database that powers this website. When we publish a new guide, it shows up in Candela automatically on next refresh. The "book cover" for each guide is the banner image you see at the top of the guide page itself.
Support
- 💬 Join our Discord for peer support
- 📞 Call 211 from any phone for local social services
Candela is a free open-source project of Techempower.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to digital equity, inclusion, and accessibility.