The iPhone or iPad was manufactured to make life simpler for you. Whether you are reading an ebook, webpage, or just using your iPhone for a long time, your eyes and hands will surely tire from bright light and holding the phone respectively. However, you can outsmart the challenges by letting your iPhone or iPad read the text to you.
iPhones and iPads come with an inbuilt feature called Speech or Spoken Content. This feature reads aloud text that you select in Apps like Notes, Gmail, Books, Safari, and more. Usually, when you highlight text, editing options like Copy and Paste will appear in a dialogue box and if this feature is enabled, Speak option will be added to the menu. Now anytime you need any kind of text to be read to you on your iPhone or iPad, select the text and tap Speak. Before we get there, we need to enable the Speech/Spoken Content feature on our iPhones or iPads.
Step 1: Go to the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.
Step 2: Tap on General from the list of displayed options.
Step 3: Select Accessibility.
Step 4: Under Accessibility, select Speech or Spoken Content.
Step 5: Toggle on the Speak Selection option. Speck Selection will read aloud text that you select in Apps like Notes, Gmail, Books, Safari, and more.
Step 6: Once you enable Speak Selection feature, the highlight Content option will appear. This feature will highlight sentences or words as they are read aloud. At the moment, the highlight feature will be disabled, tap on it then toggle it on. You will be presented with more menu options after enabling the Highlight Content feature. You can select highlight per word/sentence, sentence highlight style (underline or Background) and highlight colors for words or sentences.
Step 7: Your iPhone/iPad can also read to you the entire screen. To do so, enable the Speak Screen feature. Every time you want to launch this feature, swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen to hear the content of the screen.
For Quick access to screen speech controls, tap Screen Controller and toggle it on. The first time the Speech Controller appears, it will be in the upper left corner but you can move it to wherever you like. Anytime you want to see the Controls, tap the Arrows. To hear all text on the screen, press the Play button, you can also pause, fast forward, or skip backward. You can also change the speaking rate. To start to Speak on Touch, tap the finger icon then drag anywhere on the screen where you want to hear the text under your finger.
Typing Feedback: With this feature, your iPhone and iPad can speak each character, entire words, auto-corrections, auto-capitalization, and typing predictions.
Voices: Using this feature, you can choose voices in different languages or accents.
Speaking Rate: Do you want the text to be read to you faster or slower. You can change the speaking rate by dragging the slider.
Pronunciations: You can customize pronunciations for tricky words like places.