iPad iBooks Text to Speech Feature

[kjk]

I mentioned this in a different thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86722 but thought iPad users (and soon, Touch and iPhone users) might be interested in how Text-to-Speech works in iBooks.

The short answer is, it works fine for reading both personal content and books purchased thru iBooks. I tested it with a book I bought thru iBooks-Here, There Be Dragons, by James Owen. Interestingly, the Kindle version does not have Text-to-Speech enabled. As I noted in the other thread, I wonder if Apple is getting around this limitation (publisher requested) by integrating Text-to-Speech in their Accessibility settings-presenting the feature as more necessary for access than as a convenience feature.

The downside for those wanting to use it as a mere convenience feature? Switching on Voiceover activates Apple's other Accessibility features . So double clicks instead of single touches. Three finger swipes to scroll. Scrolling is also very slow. And the computer voice documenting every move, of course.

So, the feature is there, it works, and it doesn't seem to need publisher approval. And of course, it will read any ePub document you manage to get into iBooks on your own. I'm assuming the same will be true with PDFs when the update comes around.


Apple is pretty great about providing accessibility features in their products actually. If you missed their FaceTime demo, http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/facetime.html showing the new iPhone 4 videochat feature-they showed two people communicating via sign language over the phones...a colleague of mine who attended said there was an audible sigh in the room when that scene came on-people just got it.

[Lotus Esprit]

How do you get it to read more than one line at a time?

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Lotus Esprit

How do you get it to read more than one line at a time?

The trick is not to select one line, but to just tap on the screen itself. It will start reading from the top of the page. I think you have to do each page separately.

[Lotus Esprit]

Thanks