It is eleven at night and the explanation was written for someone else.
Not for someone slower. For someone else: someone who already had the piece you are missing.
EMBER rewrites it until it fits you, and shows you where every part of it came from.
Two things, and only one of them is the product.
Warm
EMBER
EMBER is what a student uses.
Free, and built to stay free. It is the thing this company makes that a person can hold.
Cold
Aria
Aria is what makes it possible to give away.
The control plane underneath: it decomposes a question, checks the parts against their sources, and keeps what it learns so the next student does not pay for it again.
It opens on the computer the student already has.
No install, no account required to read, no minimum specification worth printing.
-
A school Chromebook
The 4GB one issued in year nine, not the review unit.
-
A locked-down library PC
No admin rights, no extensions, a browser somebody else chose.
-
A five-year-old Android phone
On the bus, on the data left at the end of the month.
Each of these carries a measurement before it is a claim on this page.
Your own material
It works on the reading you were actually set.
The lecture slides, the scanned chapter, the problem sheet. Not a curriculum somebody sold us.
There are no screenshots of the application on this page. A measured empty frame is honest about what has been built; a mockup of a screen that does not look like that yet is not, and it is the first thing a reviewer checks against the real thing.
Accessibility
Accessibility is the architecture,
not a settings page.
Most software adds accessibility at the end, which is why most accessible software is worse than the software it is a version of.
EMBER’s accessibility features are constraints on the entire build. A component that fails contrast fails the build. A control that cannot be reached by keyboard fails the build. Response timing drives no inference anywhere in the product, because a student using switch access produces the same signature as a disengaged one, and a system that cannot tell the difference will quietly decide the first student is the second.
- Screen reader
- Native. Every surface tested on NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver.
- Keyboard
- Complete path, no traps, visible focus, ? for shortcuts.
- Switch access
- Sequential scanning. The full study loop on two switches.
- Dyslexia
- OpenDyslexic, cream ground, adjusted spacing and measure.
- Motor
- One-handed reflow, 44px minimum targets, no timed input.
- Low vision
- 200% zoom without a reflow break. WCAG AAA on body text.
- Reduced motion
- Static equivalents of EQUAL duration, never a skip.
- Accommodations
- Granted on request. No diagnosis. No paperwork. No record.
Most students with access needs at open-enrollment colleges have no documentation, because the process requires a diagnosis that requires insurance. A system that demands paperwork before it will help serves the students who least needed the help.
Ask, and it is granted. We do not keep a record that you asked.
Pricing
Students never pay.
Institutions pay on a ladder.
An institution’s price is set by the share of its students receiving Pell grants, the federal measure of how many low-income students a school serves.
Schools serving the most low-income students pay the least. It is public data. We look it up. Nobody negotiates it, including us.
| Pell share of enrolment | Per student, per semester |
|---|---|
| 70% and above | $4 |
| 55 – 69% | $7 |
| 40 – 54% | $10 |
| 25 – 39% | $12 |
| Under 25% | $16 |
| Fewer than 2,000 students | Free |
| Documented budget emergency | Free, on request, no committee |
| Individual students | Free, always, regardless |
For context: a single publisher’s courseware access code runs $90–180 per student per course. An LMS runs $15–30 per student per year.
Nothing on this ladder is being charged yet. EMBER is free to every student today and the institutional tier is not open. The numbers are printed here because a price nobody can look up is a price that gets negotiated, and this one will not be.