Roughly 9 in 10 children in sub-Saharan Africa cannot read a simple text by age 10 (World Bank learning poverty estimate). African languages written in Latin script have regular letter-sound mappings, which makes systematic phonics the evidence-based route to early reading. Soma provides the missing tooling: author once, validate automatically, and run anywhere offline.
Try the readers
Single-file web apps. No accounts, no network after the first load. Share them by SD card, Bluetooth, or any file app.
Build your own pack
Author lessons in JSON, and the validator enforces the decodability rule: no grapheme appears before it has been taught.
View on GitHubWhat is in the toolkit
- soma-core (zero dependencies): orthography profiles, syllabification, decodable word generation, decodability checking, pack validation
- soma-cli: init, validate, build, stats, serve
- soma-reader: the offline single-file reader (device text-to-speech, quizzes, progress)
- packs/: Kiswahili Grade 1 and English Grade 1 starter packs under CC BY 4.0