QUILL Lite: free AI help, in an editor that talks to you

September 25, 2026, from Community Access

Select a paragraph. Press two keys. Hear it summarized, rewritten, proofread or explained. It is free, and there is no account, no password and no card.

QUILL Lite is a small, free text editor for Windows, made for people who use a screen reader. Starting today it also has AI help that works the way you already work: from the keyboard, out loud, and without leaving you wondering what just happened.

It is free, it is open source, and it installs in about a minute.

The short version

• Two keys to an answer. Ctrl+Alt+G opens the AI pad right where you are. Ctrl+Alt+Z opens it ready for a question about your document.
• Five things it can do. Summarize, Rewrite, Proofread, Explain, and answer a plain question about the document you have open.
• All it needs is a yes. You read the agreement, say yes, and a one-minute connect step does the rest. No account, no password, no email address, no card, and no trial that runs out.
• You see what is sent. Before anything leaves your computer, the pad shows you exactly what will go, in a box you can read line by line.
• Nothing changes unless you say so. The answer arrives in its own window. It only goes into your document when you press Replace or Insert, and Ctrl+Z takes it back like any other edit.
• Your words are not kept. QUILL’s service counts how many requests you make and how big they were. It never keeps what you wrote or what came back.

Under the AI is an editor that talks back to you. It tells you which heading you just landed on, spells a misspelled word out letter by letter, gives you a status bar you can read one cell at a time, and teaches itself to you in nine short lessons.

Why we put AI here

Most AI writing help is a chat window on a web page. You paste things in and copy things out, the buttons often have no labels, the answer shows up somewhere you cannot find, and you have to make an account before you can try it. If you use a screen reader, every one of those steps is a place to get stuck.

So we started from a different question: what would AI help look like if it were made for the people everything else has left behind?

It would sit inside the editor you are already writing in. It would work on the paragraph you are in, without making you select anything. It would show you what it is about to send before it sends it. It would put the answer where your screen reader already is, so you can read it as slowly as you like. It would never change a word you did not ask it to change. And it would cost nothing and ask for nothing: no name, no email, no password.

That is QUILL Lite’s AI. It runs on QUILL’s own free service, paid for by Community Access. It is the same AI you find at the top of the AI menu in QUILL for All, so once you know it in one, you know it in both.

Your first answer, in about a minute

1. Open the agreement. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K, or choose Tools > AI > Privacy Agreement. It is there from the moment you install.
2. Read it, and choose I Agree. It says in plain words what is sent, what is kept, what is not kept, and how to change your mind. Saying yes also turns AI help on, so there is no second switch to look for.
3. Connect this computer. The Connect window opens by itself and shows an eight-character code. It reads the code to you as well. Press Open the Connect Page. Your browser opens with the code already filled in, so all you do there is press Confirm. The window tells you when you are connected.
4. Try it. Put the cursor in any paragraph, press Ctrl+Alt+G, choose Summarize, and press Send. A moment later the summary is in front of you and your screen reader is reading it.

That is all the setup there is. From then on, it is two keys.

What it can do

Press Ctrl+Alt+G to open the pad, then choose one of five things.

• Summarize. A few plain sentences saying what the passage says. Handy for a long email, a dense report, or terms and conditions.
• Rewrite. The same meaning, clearer and shorter. Good for the paragraph you have rewritten four times and still do not like.
• Proofread. Spelling, grammar and punctuation fixed, with your wording left alone. The corrected text comes back for you to compare. Your document stays the same until you say so.
• Explain. What the passage means, in plain language. Try it on jargon, a legal clause, or a paragraph you keep losing the thread of.
• Ask a question about the document. “What does this say about the deadline?” “Who do I send the form to?” Type your question, and QUILL Lite finds the parts of the document that answer it.

How it knows what to send

Here is exactly what goes.

• If you have selected something, that is what is sent.
• If you have not, the paragraph your cursor is in is sent: the text between one blank line and the next. Just put the cursor in the paragraph and press the key.
• If your document has headings, you can choose This section instead. That sends everything from the heading above you to the next heading. It works with Markdown headings, the ones that start with #.

The Send this much chooser in the pad switches between these. Above it, a read-only box shows you exactly the text that will go, and it changes as soon as you change your choice. Nothing else from your document is sent.

Asking about the whole document works a little differently. QUILL Lite does not send the whole file. It reads the document on your own computer and picks the three passages most likely to answer your question. Each is about 180 words, and each is labelled with the heading it sits under. Only those three go, along with your question, and the pad shows you which ones it chose before you press Send. So a hundred-page document is fine to ask about. The limit is on how much goes in one question, not on how big your document is.

If something is too long, the pad tells you before you send, in plain words: “that is about 4,000 words, and the free limit is about 2,250”. Choose a smaller part and try again. Nothing is used.

What happens to the answer

The answer arrives in its own window, in a box you can arrow through. Under it are four buttons.

• Replace My Selection puts the answer where your selection was.
• Insert Below puts it under the paragraph you are in.
• Copy lets you take it somewhere else.
• Try Again asks for another version.

All of them can be undone, so Ctrl+Z takes an AI edit back just like your own typing. If you changed the text while the answer was on its way, Replace is not offered, so the answer never lands on words it was not about. And you can keep working while you wait: type, save, or switch documents.

Free, and fair

Free means there is an allowance, so that everyone gets a share.

• 100 requests a month, no more than 20 a day and 8 an hour.
• A new connection starts with 15 for its first 48 hours. After that, the full allowance starts by itself.
• A request only counts if an answer comes back. If it was too long, you had no connection, or the service had a problem, nothing is used.

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9 shows how much you have used and when each count starts again. Help > About shows it too. Need more for a course, a deadline or a book? Choose Get Help from Support. Your support ID goes with the message automatically, and support can raise your allowance.

Your privacy, in plain words

The passage you ask about goes to QUILL’s service and on to OpenAI, which writes the answer. QUILL keeps how many requests you made and how big they were. It never keeps what you wrote or what came back, and it never has your name, because there is no name on the account at all.

Nothing is sent while you type, and nothing is sent in the background. If you close the pad without pressing Send, nothing is sent. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K opens the agreement again whenever you like. If you withdraw, AI help is switched off and this computer is signed out in one step.

And the editor underneath it

You already know how to use it. Ctrl+O opens. Ctrl+S saves. Ctrl+F finds. F3 finds the next one. The keys you know from Notepad and WordPad do what they always have. The difference is that QUILL Lite talks back:

• Press F6 and you are in a status bar you can read one cell at a time: the line you are on, the word count, the encoding, the line endings.
• Press F1 anywhere and it tells you what window you are in and what the control you are on does.
• Press Ctrl+F1 and every key it has is in one list you can search.
• Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and nine short lessons walk you through it, including one on asking a question about your document.
• Type a word wrong and you hear a short, quiet sound. Press one key and it spells the word out for you. “Receive” and “recieve” sound the same, and only the letters tell you which one you typed.

QUILL Lite is the editor from QUILL for All, on its own. QUILL is a full writing workshop. QUILL Lite is for when you just need to open a file, fix a line, ask a question, and save. You can install both. They sit side by side, and neither one touches the other’s settings.

It makes small sounds

QUILL Lite plays a short, quiet sound for things your screen reader does not mention: a cut, a copy, a paste, an undo, a save, a document closing. Without a sound, those moments are silent and you are left guessing.

You can change any sound, swap in a file of your own, or switch it off. The window plays each sound as you arrow through the list. Alt+Shift+M turns all of them off at once, for a phone call or a quiet room. Press it again to bring them back.

It tells you the shape of what you are reading

Arrow onto a heading and QUILL Lite says “Heading 2, Installing”. Arrow into a list and it says “Bulleted list, 5 items”. Go a level deeper and it says “Level 2, 3 items”. Arrow out and it says “Out of list”.

Your screen reader cannot tell you these things in a Windows editor, Notepad and WordPad included. On a web page it can. In an editor, a heading is just a line and a list is just some dashes, so QUILL Lite says it for you.

It says each one only once, when you arrive, and not again while you move around inside. If you are writing rather than reading and would rather not hear them, each one has a key that turns it off.

It knows Markdown and HTML, and writes them for you

Open a .md file, select a word and press Ctrl+B: you get **word**. Do the same in a .html file and you get <strong>word</strong>. The heading keys write ## Installing or <h2>Installing</h2>. In a .py file those keys politely do nothing, so you never get stray asterisks in your code.

There is a searchable picker for each: 111 HTML elements, and all of Markdown. You can search by what a thing does, not only by its name. “Glossary” finds a definition list, and “subtitles” finds a caption track. Anything your document cannot use is still listed but greyed out, so you know it is there.

The HTML picker also inserts whole form fields, not just tags. Choose a dropdown and you get the label, the field and the options, all joined up the way a screen reader needs. Choose a radio group and you get a fieldset, a legend, and three buttons that share a name, so they really work as a group. If you select a word first, it becomes the label, and the field is named to match it.

An emoji picker you can use

Most emoji pickers are a wall of little pictures. Alt+. opens a list instead. Search by name, by keyword, or by a typed smiley (:) finds the smiling face), or browse by category. Each emoji comes with a written description of what it shows. When you insert one, QUILL Lite tells you which one went in, by name.

Spell check that tells you what is wrong

Hearing “recieve is misspelled” does not help much, because it sounds just like the right word. So after a short pause, QUILL Lite spells it out. If you already knew, press your next key and you will not hear it.

You choose how it spells: plain letters, the phonetic alphabet (“romeo, echo, charlie”), or both. The phonetic alphabet helps when B, D, E, P, T and V all sound alike through a fast voice. You choose whether capitals are named. And you choose how long each pause is, separately for the three places it happens.

Land on a misspelled word and press the Applications key. The suggestions are at the top of the menu, one Down Arrow away. Under them you can ignore the word once, ignore it in this document, add it to your dictionary, or add it just for this file.

Your file comes back exactly as it went in

How your file is stored, its line endings, and whether it ends with a blank line are all kept. Open a file someone sent you, save it without changing anything, and it is exactly the same file. Many editors quietly change these things.

Tools > File Encoding and Line Endings shows you what your file uses and lets you change it on purpose.

Make it as big or as small as you want

QUILL Lite has 21 parts you can switch on or off, and four profiles that set them all in one go:

• Notepad: two areas. No formatting, no bookmarks, no line tools. Ctrl+N makes a plain text file. If you are replacing Notepad, choose this one.
• WordPad: bold, italic, headings, alignment, bullets, printing, and a spell checker WordPad never had.
• Recommended: what you get on a fresh install.
• Everything: all of it.

Choose a profile and every switch below it moves to match. Choose Custom and they go back to how they were. A box you can read line by line tells you what each profile keeps, what it removes, and anything else it changes.

If something goes wrong, a person answers

Press Ctrl+Alt+F2, or choose Help > Get Help from Support… A short form opens, and then your own mail program, with the message already started. QUILL Lite’s version, your Windows version and your screen reader are filled in at the bottom. It goes to support@community-access.org, where a person reads it and writes back.

There is no bug tracker to join and no public thread with your settings in it. Your email address is optional. You can report a problem without one, but then nobody can reply. Nothing is sent until you send it yourself.

It tells you when there is a new version

Press Ctrl+Alt+U to check. If there is nothing newer, it tells you, out loud and in a dialog.

If there is a new version, the window opens on what changed: the release notes, in a box you can arrow through, with Update and Close beside it. Your focus starts in the notes, so the first thing you hear is what is new. Update downloads it and offers to install it and restart for you. Everything you have set is kept, and nothing downloads until you say so.

It also checks once a day when it starts. It stays quiet unless there is something new, and it says nothing if the network is down. One checkbox in Settings turns this off.

Nine lessons that teach you the editor

Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to open Tutorials: nine short guided lessons in two tracks, about forty-two minutes in all.

The first track covers opening a file and giving it back unchanged, the four kinds of document, your numbered documents, and what to press when you are lost. The second covers selecting more than a few words, finding your way back, skimming something long, spelling without a red squiggle, and asking a question about the document in front of you.

Each step tells you what to press, why, and what you should hear when it worked. That last part is the one you need most when you cannot see whether anything happened. Steps show your own keys, so a lesson stays right even after you change a key.

Every key is yours to change

Tools > Keyboard Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Space) lists every command with its key. Type part of a name to find one, press Enter on it, and give it the key you want. If another command already has that key, QUILL Lite tells you which one and asks what you want to do.

Record a Key answers the question “is this key free?” Press it, press the key combination, and you hear what that key does now, or that it is free. It even notices when another program has taken the key for the whole of Windows, so it never reaches the editor at all.

Check for Problems finds three kinds of trouble: a key given to two commands, a key QUILL Lite cannot read, and a key Windows accepts but never passes on, so it looks assigned and does nothing.

Only the keys you change are saved. That way, if we improve a key in a later version, you still get it. Insert can never be taken, because your screen reader uses it.

Going back to yesterday’s version

Turn on Timestamped backups, and File > Earlier Versions… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E) lists every save of the document you are in, newest first, with twenty kept. Each one reads like “Today at 4:12 PM, 2,341 words”. The word count helps you tell them apart: two saves a minute apart sound alike, but the one that suddenly lost two thousand words is usually the one you want.

Restore puts that version into the window without saving, so Ctrl+Z takes it back and the file on disk stays as it was until you decide. Open a Copy puts it in a new window and leaves your current work alone.

Everything else, briefly

• Numbered documents in one window. Alt+1 through Alt+9 take you to each one, and the Window menu lists them all.
• Bookmarks. Nine numbered ones that stay put while you edit, a temporary one, and a list you can jump from.
• Marks. A mark remembers where you were before you went to look something up. Ctrl+Shift+M sets one, Ctrl+M takes you back, and Alt+M lists them.
• Go Back and Go Forward (Alt+Left, Alt+Right). Undo for moving around. Every jump QUILL Lite makes can be taken back.
• A copy tray and a clip history, for when one clipboard is not enough: twelve numbered slots, a collector that gathers several copies into one paste, and a library of clips you chose to keep.
• Abbreviations and snippets. Type a short form and get the long one. Or open Snippets (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Home) and pick the one whose short form you have forgotten.
• Selecting by structure. A word, a line, a sentence, a paragraph or a block, each with one key. Or press F8 to mark where a selection starts and move to the end any way you like.
• Line tools. Move, duplicate, join, sort, reverse, number, remove duplicates, quote, hard-wrap, comment out, trim, and delete every line that contains a word.
• Headings you can move, not just make. Promote and demote them, move a whole section and its subsections up or down, fold a long document down to its headings, or open the Heading Organizer (Alt+Shift+O) and rearrange them all in one list. Move Section To… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F5) asks where you want a section to go, so you do not have to press a key forty times.
• The Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). Type part of a command’s name and run it. Its key is shown beside it, which is a nice way to learn the keys.
• A special character picker (Ctrl+Shift+F2) for 357 characters that have no key on the keyboard. Search by name, by code point, or by everyday words like gbp, eszett or micro. It tells you what it put in, since many of these characters cannot be seen on the page.
• Print Preview (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+P) tells you what you need to know: how many pages, where each one breaks, and what is in the margins.
• Four kinds of document, one key. Plain text, Markdown, HTML and rich text. Alt+Shift+F moves between them, and each one says its name.
• Your formatting comes through the change. Going in and out of rich text keeps headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript, fonts, sizes, colours, highlights, lists, links, code, quotes, alignment, spacing, indents, named styles, page breaks, tables and pictures. A rich text file opens in Word with Word’s own styles, so Word’s style box says Heading 1 or Quote.
• “What is this character?” Tells a hyphen, an en dash and a minus sign apart, which a screen reader usually reads the same way.
• It looks after work you have not saved, and reopens what you had open.
• It follows your Windows colours. QUILL Lite uses the light or dark setting you already chose in Windows. Alt+Shift+D switches to dark whenever you want. Either way, colours are never written into your file.
• One set of abbreviations with QUILL for All, if you use both. Your short forms, dictionary, copy tray and bookmarks can be shared, and neither program touches the other’s until you ask it to.

Getting it

Download QUILL Lite from https://www.quillforall.org/quilllite.html. The current version is 1.2.0. There are two files. Take the first one, unless you want to run QUILL Lite from a USB stick.

Both are digitally signed, so Windows can check that nobody has changed them.

While installing, you can choose Open .txt and .rtf files with QUILL Lite. It is optional. It adds QUILL Lite to the Open With list and never makes itself the default, so Notepad, WordPad and QUILL stay just as they were.

One minute to your first document

1. Open QUILL Lite. You are in a blank document, ready to type.
2. Type something.
3. Press Ctrl+S.

And one more minute to your first answer: put the cursor in what you just typed, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K, agree, and connect. Then press Ctrl+Alt+G and choose Summarize.

If you would like a guide beside you while you learn, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and start with the first lesson.

It is free, and it is yours

QUILL Lite is open source, under the MIT licence. There is no account, no subscription and no advertising, and it does not report on you. It only goes online when you ask it to: to check for an update, or to send a passage to the AI when you press Send. Your settings and recovered work stay in a folder on your computer, and uninstalling does not delete them.

If it does something wrong, or does not do something you need, please tell us. Ctrl+Alt+F2 writes the message for you, and a person reads it. Everything in this release is here because somebody asked for it.

• Download, guides and news: https://www.quillforall.org
• The AI service, explained: https://ai.community-access.org
• Source code: https://github.com/Community-Access/quill

Arrived in QUILL Lite 1.2.0

When this was first written, three small fixes were on their way. They arrived in QUILL Lite 1.2.0, together with a thesaurus, a dictionary you can use without AI, an AI dictionary, a Google Gemini key, and Activity and Repeat Last Result. The QUILL Lite 1.2 release notes have the whole story.

• When you come back to QUILL Lite with Alt+Tab, it checks that your document is ready for typing. It will not pull you out of Find or a menu.
• If QUILL Lite cannot save your preferences, because the disk is full or the settings folder is read-only, it tells you. Your choices still work until you close the app, the warning stays in the status bar, and opening Preferences again tries the save once there is room.
• When you close QUILL Lite, anything sent to it while it closes is kept for next time. If you change your mind about closing, everything carries on as usual.

Where to learn more

• The QUILL Lite User Guide, in the Start menu beside QUILL Lite, covers everything, one chapter at a time. AI help has a chapter of its own.
• Help > Tutorials (Ctrl+Alt+F1) opens nine guided lessons. Start with Open a file, and give it back unchanged. For AI help, try Asking a question about a document.
• Help > Get Help from Support (Ctrl+Alt+F2) writes to support@community-access.org for you. A person at Community Access reads every message.

Please pass it on

Do you know someone who puts up with an editor that does not talk to them? Or someone who was told AI is not for them, because every AI tool they tried was made for somebody else? Please send them this.