Audiobooks allow you to listen to your favorite content instead of reading it, which is perfect when you’re on the go, or simply need to use your eye sight for something else. And with iOS being a comprehensive and ever-expanding platform, you can make your iPhone read aloud any piece of text.
While this doesn’t make audiobooks useless, it does let you listen to ebooks, articles, emails, messages and other types of text, and in a simple way too.
[Guide]Â Make your iPhone read aloud any piece of text
If you’d like to make your iPhone read aloud any piece of text, this can be done using the accessibility features built-in into iOS. They make it possible for your phone to speak all text on the current screen, even if scrolling is needed.
To read books using this feature, you should know iBooks work best for this purpose, as they are guaranteed to work at all times.
Navigate to Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Speech.
Toggle on the ‘Speak Screen‘ option. While it was designed to help those with physical impairment, it can be useful for any of us as with it enabled, you simply need to swipe two fingers from the top of the screen and your phone will start reading to read the text on it.
Now simply load an online article or an ebook you want to listen to and swipe down from the top of the screen using two fingers. Your iPhone will begin to read the screen’s text content and a pop up with playback controls will be displayed as well.
As a result, you can speed up or slow down reading speed, return to the previous page, skip to the next one, use play/pause, minimize the pop up into one button and close.
Optionally, you can change the talkback voice as iOS comes with various built-in voices, each with its own English accent. This can be done from Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Speech -> Voice.
Now that you’ve learned how to make your iPhone read aloud any piece of text, be aware that it cannot read image-only PDFs (even if the images contain text). Also, the ‘scrolling’ capability doesn’t refer to physical scrolling, instead, your iPhone will continue reading the text on the screen below than what you see. And if you want it to read a new screen, you’re going to have to swipe down using two fingers from the top of the screen again.
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