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Dear Technomancer,

I recently took a blow to the head that stole my ability to read. I can see the marks on the paper, but I can no longer understand them. I used to read and write five languages fluently, but now I can’t read or write anything. The Mother’s physician says with time, the damage might heal, but I can’t bear the thought of endless days without my beloved books. My boyfriend can’t read them aloud to me because he has no tongue. I have an iPad, but while I can see the icons and know what they are supposed to do, I can’t read any of the words. Help!

Umegat, Divine of the Fifth God, from Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Dear Umegat,

It sounds like you’ve been having your God’s own luck lately, but fortunately your iPad does have the capability to read out loud to you. There are five ways I will tell you, starting from the simplest, which uses touch gestures, moves on to techniques that use a combination of touch gestures and voice commands, and ends with the most complex, which uses Voice Control.

Use Gestures To Summon the Speech Controller to Read For You.

1. Drag two fingers down from the top of the screen. This will open the Spoken Content Speech Controller and start reading the page. To stop reading, press the pause button in the center of the controller.
2. If you stop reading, eventually it will disappear.
3. If dragging two fingers down from the top does not work, go to Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content, and turn on Speak Screen.

Use Speech Commands to Summon the Speech Controller to Read for You

1. Say ‘Hey Siri.’
2. When Siri appears, say ‘Speak Screen.’ The Speech Controller will appear, and start reading. To stop reading, press the pause button in the center of the controller.

Use Settings to Place the Speech Controller on the Screen Permanently.

1. Open settings.
2. Open accessibility.
3. Open spoken content.
4. Turn on speak screen.
5. Turn on speech controller. This will make a small control bar appear. It has a play button in the center. The speech controller will collapse and hide itself as a little mostly transparent icon when not in use, and to bring it back up all you have to do is touch it.
6. Open a reading app like Kindle or Books or a webpage on Safari.
7. Bring up the speech controller by tapping on it, and then press the center play button.
8. Your iPad will start reading the book out loud to you, and will keep reading until you open the speech controller and press the center button again to pause it.
9. If you want to skip back a page, press the back button with the two triangles to the left of center. If you want to skip forward a page, press the forward button with two triangles to the right of center.
10. If you want to change the reading speed, press the rightmost button until it is at the speed you want. The left-most button will read buttons that are under your finger, but it isn’t useful at all for reading books, because putting your finger on a page will read the whole page.
11. The default reading voice for English is Siri, but returning to the Spoken Content settings will allow you to choose different voices for different languages
12. To get rid of the speech controller, follow steps one through 5 to turn it off.

Using Voiceover and Gestures to read out loud to you.

1. Go to the book you want to read in an app like Kindle or Books or Safari.
2. Say “Hey Siri.”
3. When Siri appears, say “Turn on VoiceOver.
4. Note: Because VoiceOver is on, all of the gestures you knew to control your iPhone no longer work. You will have to learn new ones and become adept at turning VoiceOver off when it frustrates you. see list of gestures here To turn VoiceOver off, say ‘Hey Siri.’ and when Siri appears, say ‘Turn off VoiceOver. However, for now we want VoiceOver on.
5. To exit out of Siri (or any App), either press the Home button if you have one, or put your finger at the bottom of the screen and drag it up. You will hear two rising tones (Apple likes to call them haptic feedback for whatever reason) and will quit out of Siri and return to your reading app.
6. VoiceOver will probably start reading right away. However, sometimes it starts giving you instructions on what you can do in the kindle app. Either way, you will want to stop it. To stop VoiceOver mid-word, do a two-finger single tap on the screen. This will pause VoiceOver.
7. VoiceOver has dozens of reading options, but the one you are most interested in will be the continuous reading. To tell VoiceOver to read continuously, drag downward with two fingers.
8. Anytime you wish to pause, do a two-fingered single tap on the page. To restart where you left off, do another two-fingered single tap.
9. Again, all of your gestures are now completely different. If you want to turn a page, you have to do a three-fingered swipe to the left or the right. If you want to use all of your old gestures, you have to turn VoiceOver off.
10. To turn off VoiceOver, say ‘hey Siri.’ When Siri appears, say ‘turn off VoiceOver.’

Using Voice Control, VoiceOver, headphones, and pure voice commands to Read for You.

1. Put on headphones. This requires headphones because trying to give voice commands while your iPhone or iPad is speaking out loud to you does not work at all. Your iPhone won’t hear you over the sound of its own talking.
2. Say ‘Hey Siri.’
3. When Siri appears, say ‘Turn On Voice Control.’
4. If Siri does not dismiss itself, say ‘Hey Siri, cancel.’ This will exit out of Siri.
5. Say ‘Open Kindle. to open the kindle app, or ‘Open Books’ to open the Books app, or ‘Open Safari’ to open a web browser.
6. Hopefully, the app is already open to the book you want to read. Otherwise, this is going to be difficult for you in particular, Umegat, since because of your concussion you can’t read letters or numbers at all. If your boyfriend is near, you can use the command ‘Show Numbers Continuously’ to put a number beside everything that is selectable, and he can sign to you the number of the book is you want to read. Say the number, and the iPhone will open that book. Say ‘Hide numbers’ to hide the numbers.
7. Once you are in the book, say ‘Turn on VoiceOver’. Voice Control will turn on VoiceOver, and it will start saying things to you, such a list of menu items at the top of the screen.To get it to stop saying things, say ‘VoiceOver stop speaking.’
8. To get it to start reading, say ‘Voiceover Read All.’ This will read from the top of the current page. To get it to stop, say ‘VoiceOver Stop Speaking.’ Unfortunately, this does not ‘pause’ voiceover. Instead, in just stops it, and when you say ‘read all’ to start it again, it starts again from the top of whatever page you are on. So far, I have not found any voice control verbal command equivalent for a two-finger single tap gesture that pauses the book and restarts where you left off.
9. Sometimes, you end up in a situation where your phone is clearly showing one page when VoiceOver is reading another page, because VoiceOver and VoiceControl don’t always play well together. At that point, it’s better to say ‘Turn Off Voiceover’ to turn it off and ‘turn on VoiceOver to turn it back on.
10. To turn off Voice Control, say ‘turn off Voice Control.’ A Pop-up window will appear asking if you want to execute this command. Say ‘execute’ and Voice Control will turn itself off.

Using Voice Control, Spoken Content, headphones, and voice commands to Read for You.

1. Put on headphones. This requires headphones because trying to give voice commands while your iPhone or iPad is speaking out loud to you does not work at all. Your iPhone won’t hear you over the sound of its own talking.
2. Say ‘Hey Siri.’
3. When Siri appears, say ‘Turn On Voice Control.’
4. If Siri does not dismiss itself, say ‘Hey Siri, cancel.’ This will exit out of Siri.
5. Say ‘Open Kindle.’ to open the Kindle app, or ‘Open Books’ to open the books app, or ‘Open Safari’ to open a web browser.
6. Hopefully, the app is already open to the book you want to read. Otherwise, this is going to be difficult for you in particular, Umegat, since you can’t read letters or numbers at all. However, if your boyfriend is near, you can use the command ‘show numbers continuously’ to put a number beside everything that is selectable, and he can tell you what the number of the book is you want to read. Say the number, and the iPhone will open that book.
7. Say ‘Speak Screen.’ This will bring up the speech controller, and the iPad will start reading the book to you. This is the part I found a B buggy, because I had to repeat the speak screen command five or six times before it actually started speaking instead of having the speech controller briefly appear and disappear without saying anything.
8. Unfortunately, the speech controller controls apparently do not have voice commands, so the two ways of getting Speak Screen to stop are ugly hacks. The first is to switch to a different app, which will shut down Speak Screen. The second is to say ‘Show Grid’ and use numbers on the grid to press the pause button. Since you can’t read numbers, this doesn’t work well for you.
9. To turn off Voice Control, say ‘turn off Voice Control.’ A Pop-up window will appear asking if you want to execute this command. Say ‘execute’ and Voice Control will turn itself off.

I wish you the best in your recovery, however slow or speedy that will be, and that your iPad will help you keep your connection with your beloved books. May the fifth God spare you from any more of his ambiguous blessings.

Sincerely, Ataraxy the Technomancer

P.S. I highly recommend reading the Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold for its high fantasy worldbuilding, outstanding characterization, realistic depictions of chronic illness, sexism, inequality, and the best use of Deux Ex Machina interventions in a world where Gods exist and take an active role in events.

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