About this project
Free knowledge, made listenable.
Curio Garden is an accessibility-first experiment in turning the depth and serendipity of Wikipedia into a calm listening library. Search an article, choose a section, save your place, or carry a queue into your podcast app.
The idea
Curiosity should not depend on a screen.
Reading a long encyclopedia article can be difficult when vision, fatigue, mobility, or context makes a visual interface a poor fit. Curio Garden treats audio as a first-class way to explore—not an afterthought bolted onto a wall of text.
It also tries to honor the thing that makes Wikipedia possible: transparent sourcing, contributor history, open licenses, and the invitation to keep learning beyond this interface.
Under the garden bed
A product, not a prototype shell.
Revision-aware Wikipedia ingestion
Articles retain their source revision, contributor-history link, citations, related topics, and media provenance while being reshaped for listening.
Resilient audio delivery
Section-level synthesis, provider-aware caching, resumable playback, downloadable articles, and an Edge TTS fallback keep listening useful when one service is under pressure.
Web and podcast, one pipeline
The same structured article audio powers browser playback, featured-article episodes, trending briefings, and private personal playlist feeds.
Accessibility in the architecture
Semantic controls, keyboard navigation, visible focus, live status updates, reduced motion, local persistence, and screen-reader-friendly structure are treated as product behavior.
Built to be explored and inspected.
Local mode works without accounts or a database for quick inspection. The full deployment adds Convex caching and storage, Clerk-backed accounts, synced libraries, private podcast feeds, analytics, and scheduled publishing. The source, tests, setup notes, and tradeoffs are available in the public repository.
View the source on GitHub (opens in new tab)