iPhone/iPad Low Vision: Using the Speak Screen Feature

Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today, we will be checking out our Speak Screen feature. Now Speak Screen is meant to be used by those of us with low vision. And this is a super nice feature, that can really help to reduce eye fatigue by reading aloud everything that's on our screen. So if we happen to find that we're having eye strain headaches by the end of the day because we've read too many emails or maybe articles on our favorite news site, then Speak Screen is a must have feature.

Now we're using our iPad in today's workshop. However all of this will work pretty much the same, whether we're using our iPad, our iPhone, or even our iPod Touch. So let's jump right in, and check out our Speak Screen feature.

All right, we will first need to turn on Speak Screen before we can actually use it. And we will turn it on from within our Settings app. Okay, our Settings app is right here on our Home screen. So we'll go ahead and just touch Settings.

Great, our settings have opened and we have been given two lists. Now our Speak Screen setting is within our Accessibility settings. So we will look for Accessibility, here in our left list. And there it is. Great, we will just tap it.

Yeah, our Accessibility button is now highlighted. And we notice that all of our Accessibility settings have opened here in our right list. Now we'll find our Speak Screen settings within our Spoken Content settings. And Spoken Content is right here, in our right list. So we'll tap Spoken Content.

Cool, our Spoken Content settings have opened. And Speak Screen is the second item in our right list here. Now all the way to the right, we see that we have an on/off switch. So we'll simply tap it to turn it on.

Great, our Speak Screen settings are now on. So how about we head to our iBooks app to check out how Speak Screen works. Yeah, but first things first, we will close our Settings app here.

Okay, our settings are closed. And our iBooks app is right here on our desktop. So we'll just tap it. All right, iBooks has opened. And our book here is 'Call of the Wild.' Yeah, this is the perfect time for us to use Speak Screen.

Now our gesture for starting Speak Screen is a two-finger swipe down. And we are going to want to swipe down, from the very top edge of our screen.

Okay, a really good tip here is that we need to have just little space between our two fingers. Yeah, a good rule of thumb is that we can actually place our thumb between our two fingers. So let's give it a try. We will swipe down from the very top edge of our screen with two fingers.

VoiceOver: 'The Call of the Wild, by Jack.

Douglas: Yeah as we can see, our player controls have appeared and we just tapped our Pause button here so that we can discuss it.

Now our player controls will keep trying to minimize, just like it just did. It kind of slides to the side so that we have the ability to see our entire screen. It kind of turns into what looks like a little icon. Anyway, we will just tap it if we want to make our controls visible again. So let's do just that, we'll just tap our icon to open our controls again.

Now at the far left of our player controls, we have our Minimize button. And we would tap this button to minimize our controls again. Yeah, just to the right of our minimize button, we have a button that looks like a little pointing hand. And if we tap this button, we can just tap where we would like our Speak Screen to begin reading, which is really nice.

Now just to the left and right of our Play button in the center, we have rewind and Fast-Forward buttons. Now if we're in an iBook, our Rewind and Fast-Forward buttons will actually take us to the previous and next page.

Okay just to the right of our Fast-Forward button, we have our Speed button. And we would simply tap this button if we would like to speed up or slow down our speech.

Yeah, we also have a cancel button that looks like an X here on the far right side of our player controls. And you've probably already guessed that touching our X button here will cancel our speech and close our player controls.

Okay, we've already mentioned that we have our Play/Pause button right in the center of our controls. And of course, tapping our Play/Pause button will begin our speech reading again. So how about we do just that? We will tap Play.

VoiceOver: 'The Call of the Wild,' by Jack London. Produced by Ryan, Kirstin, Linda and Rick Trapp, and David Widger. Chapter 1, Into the Primitive. Old longings nomadic.

Douglas: Yeah, and we tapped our Pause button there again. One of my favorite things about using our Speak Screen feature to read a book is that once we reach the end of a page, our page will automatically turn and continue reading. And that is really nice.

Okay, that pretty much covers how to use our Speak Screen feature. We're able to use Speak Screen in so many different places. As we just saw, Speak Screen does a great job when reading our iBooks aloud. However, we can also use it to read articles while browsing the web. We could use it to read our notes or documents, and we can even use it to read our emails if we like.

Yeah I tell you, Speak Screen really is something that I find myself using almost every single day. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.