Sunday, August 19, 2012

Text to Speech on iPad

Text-to-speech has been improved on the iPad! Before, it was linked to other "Accessibility" (for the sight-impaired) features, and was clumsy. But now you can turn it on in the "General" settings. (The voice is also now male and better quality than in earlier incarnations.) And if you select text, "speak" comes up. It does not work in the Kindle app (puzzling and sad. I don't know why, since Kindle devices have had this feature for years), but it does work in most apps where you can select text, including iBooks.

I saw a YouTube video demonstrating how it will continue to read, and even turn pages automatically in iBooks. But on my iPad 3 or 2, it will only read selected text (stroke down with two fingers to select). This makes the feature sadly limited, you have to select text again for each new page!

Does anybody know how to make this work better?


(This is different than on my iPad 3 or 2, the text selections also looks different.)

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