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tomsem · 08-04-2017, 01:20 AM

It is not exactly text-to-speech, but iOS has an Accessibility feature called Speak Screen: in the Settings app, go to General, Accessibility, Speech. If you enable Speak Screen, then when you swipe two fingers from top of screen, it will read the text on the screen. Apps vary in their support for this feature. IBooks has great support (in both 'paged' and 'scrolling' mode), Kindle is also very good (but doesn't support word/sentence highlighting but will read continuously, turning pages etc.). Apart from these two, I have not found any other reading apps that do 'continuous reading' properly using Speak Screen, and I have tried (and continue to check) many reading apps. Some don't work at all with it (Nook, Digital Editions), others just read a page at a time (Play Books, Marvin), or work poorly with it (Kobo). But Kindle and iBooks are probably the most popular reading apps on iOS.

(Also in Speech Settings panel) You can select from dozens of different voices for English, in various 'inflections'. And other languages generally have at least 2 or 3 to pick from. The higher quality voices require downloading.

There are at least a couple of reading apps that explicitly support text to speech, without Accessibility's Speak Screen. Bookari is one, with ePub and PDF support, DRM support etc., and has a relatively advanced set of reading features. Another is Natural Reader, which has a broader range of format support, but does not support DRM and has more basic reading features.

08-04-2017, 01:20 AM	#2
tomsem Grand Sorcerer Posts: 6,480 Karma: 26425959 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: USA Device: iPhone 15PM, Kindle Scribe, iPad mini 6, PocketBook InkPad Color 3	It is not exactly text-to-speech, but iOS has an Accessibility feature called Speak Screen: in the Settings app, go to General, Accessibility, Speech. If you enable Speak Screen, then when you swipe two fingers from top of screen, it will read the text on the screen. Apps vary in their support for this feature. IBooks has great support (in both 'paged' and 'scrolling' mode), Kindle is also very good (but doesn't support word/sentence highlighting but will read continuously, turning pages etc.). Apart from these two, I have not found any other reading apps that do 'continuous reading' properly using Speak Screen, and I have tried (and continue to check) many reading apps. Some don't work at all with it (Nook, Digital Editions), others just read a page at a time (Play Books, Marvin), or work poorly with it (Kobo). But Kindle and iBooks are probably the most popular reading apps on iOS. (Also in Speech Settings panel) You can select from dozens of different voices for English, in various 'inflections'. And other languages generally have at least 2 or 3 to pick from. The higher quality voices require downloading. There are at least a couple of reading apps that explicitly support text to speech, without Accessibility's Speak Screen. Bookari is one, with ePub and PDF support, DRM support etc., and has a relatively advanced set of reading features. Another is Natural Reader, which has a broader range of format support, but does not support DRM and has more basic reading features. Last edited by tomsem; 08-04-2017 at 01:23 AM.