iPhone/iPad VoiceOver: Voice Dream Reader App

Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today, we are going to be checking out the Voice Dream Reader App, and I'll tell you the Voice Dream Reader App has become my go-to must have text to speech book reading app. I use my Voice Dream Reader app pretty much every single day. So let's jump right in and check it all out.

All right, our Voice Dream Reader App just so happens to be open. And we are right here in our library screen, which is simply a list of all of the content that we've added for reading. Now, when our home screen first opens, we are usually placed on our add button here in the top left corner of our screen. Double tapping here will give us several ways that we can actually add content. This is where we can add content from Bookshare, text that we've added to our clipboard, documents from apps like Dropbox and even content from our files app and I tell you that is super fantastic.

As we said, our library here is simply a list of all of the content that we've added for reading, and we could simply just right swipe through our list and just double tap to start reading any of these. But today we're gonna spend our time exploring our reading screen. Okay, our now reading screen is currently collapsed and it's collapsed kind of into a mini player, which is located right here across the bottom edge of our screen. And of course, just above our settings here, remember we could just double tap on any of our books here and they would open in our now reading screen. However, our mini player will open the last book or item that we happened to be reading.

Now, we will need to be placed in our mini player before we can actually expand it into, of course our now reading screen. Of course we could just right swipe through all of the books in our library and we would eventually find it, or we could left swipe from our tools here across the bottom edge of our screen. However, we could just simply touch above our tools here, to find our now reading mini players so let's go ahead and do it. We'll just touch our mini player here.

VoiceOver: Now, reading.

Douglas: Great and we got lucky here and we could just double tap to expand our mini player here. But if we right swipe from here, we would find our play button and of course we could just play our current book from here and right swiping again, would give us our next item button for skipping to the next item in our library here, but let's go ahead and just double tap to expand our mini player here. And we'll go ahead and just double tap here.

VoiceOver: Library button.

Douglas: Okay, our mini player has expanded and our now reading screen has opened, and of course we've been placed on our library button here in the top left corner of our screen. And if we were to double tap our library button, our now reading screen would simply just collapse back into our mini player and we would be right back in our library list but we don't want that because we wanna check out all of our reader controls. Now we won't be able to go into detail with everything here, because there is just so much packed into our Voice Dream Reader. However, we will cover all the basics here and we'll also touch on some really cool kind of hidden features as well. So how about we go ahead and just right swipe and we'll check out all of our reader controls here. Just right swipe.

VoiceOver: Document button. Okay, here we find our document button and our document button gives us the ability to share highlights of our document with others. We could email or even message them as attachments. And we also have the ability to edit our document from here as well and that's pretty great. All right, let's just right swipe from here. We'll right swipe.

VoiceOver: Controls button. Okay, here we find our control settings and this is where we will find some of our advanced reader settings as well as our sleep timer settings. Now we're gonna discuss in just a bit, a really quick way for setting our sleep timer. So instead of going here, let's just right swipe from here.

VoiceOver: Audio settings, button adjustable, swipe up or down to adjust speed.

Douglas: Yeah and here is our audio settings button. Now we have several adjustable items here on our screen, and we will hear the hint to swipe up or down here to adjust the value. Now in this case, since we are on our audio settings, swiping up will speed up our readers speech rate and swiping down will slow it back down again and tell you that's super handy for us there.

Now, this is also an audio settings button. So if we were to double tap all of our audio settings will open and we could explore through those, but we're not gonna explore through all of those today, we really could have an entire workshop on just going through the settings here. However, it really is nice that we've been given so many settings so that we can really customize our app to work just right for us here. Okay, so let's go ahead and just right swipe from here and we'll right swipe.

VoiceOver: Visual settings button.

Douglas: And here are our settings so we could double tap here to change our font or text size, or we could choose between a wide range of background and text colors. I tell you, we would really wanna come back here and explore this area later. Okay, and we will just right swipe from here. We'll right swipe.

VoiceOver: Add bookmark button.

Douglas: Yeah, here we find our add bookmark button in the top right hand corner of our screen. It really is nice to be able to bookmark important parts of our books so that we can easily go back to it later and we can add a bookmark simply by double tapping right here. Now we'll talk about where to find all of our bookmarks in just a bit, but for now we'll go ahead and just right swipe.

VoiceOver: Previous item button.

Douglas: Yeah, here is our previous item button and if we double tap here, we'll be taken to the previous item in our library list and that's pretty cool. So we'll go ahead and right swipe.

VoiceOver: Next item button.

Douglas: Okay, and here's our next item button and you guessed it, double tapping here will take us to the next item in our library list. Okay, so we will just right swipe.

VoiceOver: What's new 4.11.0.

Douglas: Okay, here we find our chapter heading for the book that we're currently reading and that's kinda nice for us to know there so we'll go ahead and just right swipe from here.

VoiceOver: Text 4.8.0, Voice Dream does OCR!

Douglas: And we just paused VoiceOver here with our two finger single tap. Okay now this is the text or reading pane here. And as we just heard, this is where we will find all of our books texts. Now it's really great that we're able to get to our texts because this means that we don't necessarily have to use our voice string readers built in speech engine for reading all of our documents. We could actually use VoiceOver for reading it if we'd like. We're also able to pair our refreshable braille device to our iPhone in this case and read our documents text in braille and that is really fantastic for us there. Okay, so let's go ahead and right swipe from here. We just right swipe.

VoiceOver: Headings bookmarks and highlights button.

Douglas: Okay, here is our headings bookmarks and highlights button. Now this is a really important button because this is where we will find not only our bookmarks, but we'll find our documents table of contents and we'll also find any highlights that we created right here. Yeah, it's super easy for us to just swipe through all of our chapters and double tap to quickly jump right to them right here. Okay, so we'll just right swipe.

VoiceOver: Select text starting with 4.8.0, swipe up or down to move the selection by word, or swipe with three fingers to move by sentence. Double tap to proceed.

Douglas: All right and we heard this is another adjustable item, and this is actually used for selecting our text. Now, once we've actually selected some text here, we're able to do things like create a highlight from it. We could of course, copy it to our clipboard for pasting into another text area. We're given the option for creating a note, or we could be given the definition of a word or even its pronunciation. So, this is a super powerful feature for us, for sure. Yeah, so let's go ahead and just swipe from here.

VoiceOver: Play button adjustable, swipe up to rewind and swipe down to fast forward, swipe up or down with one finger to adjust the value.

Douglas: Okay and you guessed it. This is our play and pause button. Of course we could just double tap here to play and pause our book. Now we mentioned earlier, that we have a really easy way for setting our sleep timer as well. Well, all we have to do to set our sleep timer is just to perform a double tap and hold and we do that right here on our play button.

Now the keyword here is hold because if we simply just double tap, we will start our play button and our reader would begin playing for us. So we'll need to hold on that second tab there. Okay, we also heard VoiceOver announce that our play button is also another adjustable item, and that means we're able to swipe up or down to fast forward our rewind through our text as it's reading. Now we're able to choose exactly how we want to move through our document with a next button that we're gonna find here. So how about we go ahead and just right swipe to that and we'll just right swipe.

VoiceOver: Navigation unit, 15 seconds adjustable.

Douglas: Okay, right now our play button is set to fast forward and rewind by 15 second increments. However, we can change how we fast forward and rewind by simply swiping up and down here. So how about we just swipe up until we find a paragraph here, so we'll go ahead and just swipe up here.

VoiceOver: 30 seconds.

Douglas: and we can move by 30 seconds.

VoiceOver: 60 seconds.

Douglas: 60 seconds.

VoiceOver: Sentence.

Douglas: Sentences if you like.

VoiceOver: Paragraph.

Douglas: All right, and there we go. There on paragraph now. Since we've selected to move by paragraph, we can just single finger double tap right now to move forward by our paragraphs, but we'll only be able to move forward through our document. However, if we swipe back to our play button, we're now able to fast forward and rewind by paragraphs. And that is super cool. Okay, so we'll go ahead and just right swipe here.

VoiceOver: Search button.

Douglas: All right, here is our search button. Now double tapping our search button will give us the ability to search through the text of our entire book or document. And that is super powerful for us. Okay, so let's go ahead and just right swipe.

VoiceOver: About one minute 27 seconds.

Douglas: Okay and here we are told our elapsed reading time, so we know exactly how much we've read here. Okay, so we will right swipe.

VoiceOver: Position 10 percent button adjustable.

Douglas: Great and here is another adjustable bar and our adjustable bar here gives us the ability to swipe up and down to move by larger chunks through our text. And that can be really helpful, especially if we wanna quickly get back to the beginning of our text here. Okay, we only have one more button here, so, we'll go ahead and just right swipe.

VoiceOver: About 13 minutes, one second remaining.

Douglas: Yeah and here we are given the remaining time for our document or in this case, this book that we have open here. All right, that pretty much covers all of the main controls and all of the main features here in our Voice Dream Reader App. And I know I've said it before, but this is really an app that I find myself using pretty much every single day. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take Care and I'll see you next time.