IkoReadTube

READ THE VIDEO. IkoReadTube turns a YouTube video into a few lines of text, for screens that were never going to play it. About 42 KB, no video player, no autoplay. Open IkoReadTube.

The problem: big source, small screen

YouTube is a high-bandwidth source. E-paper readers, watch browsers, a Raspberry Pi on a shelf, an old phone, a slow or metered connection: all low-bandwidth, low-spec, or both. Most of the time you do not need the video. You need the point of it. We at Ikosagon built a way to get the crucial part across, in text, at a size almost any device can load.

How you use it

• FOCUS. Search for what you want and open a result. The summary answers that, not a generic recap. If the video does not cover it, the page says NOT COVERED IN THIS VIDEO.
• LESS / MORE. Step the detail down to a couple of lines, or up to a fuller read, in place.
• ASK. Type one question about the video and get a short answer taken from it. If the video does not say, the answer says that.
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE. One small link at the bottom of every video. We link out and never re-host video.

Guest only. No accounts, no sign-in. Your theme, thumbnail setting and recent list stay in your own browser.

Built for e-paper and low-spec screens

• Tiny. About 42 KB on a first visit with an empty cache, including the pixel font and the video list; about 28 KB of that is our own code. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No player, no framework, no tracking scripts.
• Text first. Thumbnails are off unless you switch them on. One column, big tap targets.
• Calm. Flat colours, no gradients or shadows, no transitions. The one blinking cursor stops if your device asks for reduced motion.

Tested on Kindle and Kobo e-ink readers. We have also tested it in desktop and phone-sized browsers. For watches, Raspberry Pis, old phones and slow connections it is designed for, and we have not tested on those yet. We say so on purpose, and we will update this page when we have.

Accessibility

High contrast, plain text, and as little to load as we can manage: that is the accessibility case as much as the bandwidth one.

• Three themes (sepia paper, Game Boy green, grey dark), each with body text at 7:1 contrast or better.
• Large type and tap targets of at least 44 px.
• Usable from the keyboard: Escape or Backspace goes BACK, the left and right arrow keys step LESS and MORE, and the search and ask boxes are plain form fields.
• Reading a short text answer instead of watching and listening can help on a slow connection, on a small screen, or when sound is not an option. It does not replace captions or a transcript for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the summary is not a transcript.

We have not run a formal accessibility audit or tested with screen readers yet. If something is hard to use on your device, tell us.

How it works

1. The home list comes from channels we picked, fetched with the free YouTube Data API and kept for a few minutes so the page stays quick and inside the free quota. Search uses the same API.
2. When you open a video, Gemini listens to its audio and writes the summary, answering your FOCUS if you set one. ASK uses the same video. For a song, the summary is about what the lyrics say, never a description of the picture.
3. Very long videos (over 40 minutes) and very short ones (under 20 seconds) show the channel description instead of an AI summary.
4. Our API keys stay on our server. The page only talks to our own small API routes.

What to know

• SOURCE matters. Summaries and answers are written by AI (Gemini), not by YouTube, and can be wrong or miss a detail. Each one is labelled, and the video is one tap away.
• We run on free tiers, so there are daily limits. When one is reached, the page tells you plainly instead of failing quietly.
• IkoReadTube is an independent project. It is not made by or affiliated with YouTube or Google.
• The page asks search engines not to index it, so it is a demo you open from here.

Design note: three themes

The look is deliberately plain. One button cycles sepia paper (the default), Game Boy green and grey dark, and the page remembers your choice. The Game Boy theme is a nod to small handheld screens, not the point of the product.

Status

A live demo on real YouTube data, tested on Kindle and Kobo e-ink readers. It is small and still changing. Next up is testing on the rest of the low-spec list (watches, Raspberry Pis, old phones), and we will report what we find, good or bad.