Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Reading Books Aloud with VoiceOver
The iPad includes VoiceOver, an accessibility feature for people with
limited vision that reads aloud text and the names of onscreen ele-
ments. It's also a way to have iBooks read a book to me while I'm
cooking, driving, or otherwise wanting a textbook to act like an
audiobook. When iBooks was first introduced, the VoiceOver feature
was limited to reading back just one page at a time in its synthesized
voice. However, that limitation has been lifted and reading now flows
automatically from one page to the next.
To use VoiceOver, you'll have to do a little system-wide preference
set-up and learn a few new gestures to control the iPad. To give it a
try, do the following:
1.
In Settings > General > Accessiblity > VoiceOver, tap the VoiceOver
switch to On.
2.
In a book within iBooks, tap once anywhere in the text and then
flick up with two fingers to begin reading the page. When the end
of the page is reached, it turns automatically and continues read-
ing the next page.
3.
To pause at any time, tap the screen with two fingers. Tapping
again with two fingers restarts the reading.
Another way to navigate a book or PDF is to look for occurrences of
specific text (or, I suppose, to find out how many times an author swears
throughout the text). The number of matches appears at the bottom of
the results list. This feature also provides convenient Search Google and
Search Wikipedia buttons to expand your search in Safari.
