Accruva: the reading app for neurodivergent brains that generic apps miss

I never set out to build a reading app. I was just a parent watching his daughter slowly break her heart over a textbook.

It was a Tuesday night. I was sat at the kitchen table watching my fifteen-year-old daughter try to revise for her Highers. Highlighters and post-it notes scattered everywhere. Twenty minutes stuck on the same page, and she was wiped out, and not from lack of trying. Her brain had used up everything it had just keeping her eyes tracking the lines, so there was nothing left for the actual reading.

She’s creative, funny, and a lateral thinker. All of which I wish I’d been at her age. She’s also neurodivergent. Dyslexic and ADHD. She’d spent years quietly getting on with it, with a determination that honestly used to break my heart a bit.

What I’d never properly worked out until that night was what was actually happening. The standard framing for this kind of thing (she gets distracted, she doesn’t focus, she needs to try harder) turns a mechanical problem into a character flaw, and that does an enormous amount of damage. The reality, I came to find out over the next several months of obsessively reading cognitive science, is something like this. Unbroken walls of text impose a heavy tracking and decoding load on the eye and brain before any actual comprehension can happen. For a neurodivergent reader, that load can eat most of the working memory the task needs. By the time she got to the end of a sentence, there was nothing left to understand what she’d just read. The intelligence wasn’t the issue. It was the format she was being given.

The standard advice for this (Pomodoro timers, “find a quiet room”, “highlight as you go”) is well-meaning, but it wasn’t helping her. It’s a bit like telling someone who’s drowning that they only need to swim better.

I kept thinking: someone must have built a tool that actually helps. Something that trains you to read better, not just faster. Something that works with a neurodivergent brain rather than against it. Something a fifteen-year-old would actually open more than once.

Nobody had. So we built one.

Most of the next several months went into the cognitive science of reading. I learned that the traditional advice for reading comprehension (focus harder, use a ruler, read it again) is essentially useless when the bottleneck is working memory rather than effort. The apps in the speed-reading category were, almost without exception, built for neurotypical professionals trying to skim more emails. Clinical, overwhelming, indifferent to the sensory needs of a student carrying exam stress. That was the quiet, slightly desperate beginning of Accruva.

We started with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation and semantic chunking. Instead of forcing her eyes to dart back and forth across a dense page, we built an interface that fed her text in rhythmic bursts of two to four words. We added Bold Flow, which bolds the leading letters of each word so a rapid-fire brain can lock on without burning fuel decoding every character. We added five reading modes total, because no single mode fits every brain or every kind of text.

The first time she used the prototype on a notoriously dense chapter of her Higher English text, the shift in her energy was visible. The words stopped dancing for her. We’d given her brain a steady, predictable rhythm to follow. For the first time in years she wasn’t decoding letters. She was absorbing concepts.

The change wasn’t how fast she read. It was that she finally understood what she’d read.

Accruva gave her back her reading and her independence. Study sessions that used to be exhausting battles of willpower became confident, efficient routines. When the time came to look at university applications and the mountain of reading that comes with them, she wasn’t terrified. She knew she had the right tools.

We built Accruva for her because she deserved a system that recognised her potential, not one that punished her divergence. But she isn’t the only brilliant mind trapped by a broken format. There are millions of capable neurodivergent readers quietly losing self-esteem because the medium doesn’t match the mind. Accruva is for them too.

You will get through that textbook. We’ll help.

RossFounder, Accruva