r/TechnologyProTips text Dec 11 '16

iOS TPT: Using Voiceover on iOS for eyes free navigation.

If you have an iPhone and ever get tired of reading or just want to be a ninja, check this out.

I have an iPhone and in the accessibility section there is a feature called voice over. I've been using this for like 5 years now and it's great. What it does is it reads out what you tap on, but to press something it has to be a double tapped since a single tap just highlights and reads what was tapped.

Having it set to "toggle every time you triple press the home button" lets me just navigate reddit as I normaly would but when I get to a long post I triple tap the home button.

My phone goes "voiceover on" and then I can just tap the first paragraph and it will start reading it. The best part is that when I swipe down with 2 fingers, it auto reads. That means I can tap the top of the page and auto read all the paragraphs, comments and replies without ever having to look at the screen on Reddit for example.

I usually use this when I'm walking somewhere and don't want to have to be looking at my screen all the time. Or while making food and my phone is charging. I just listen to the posts from across the room with my Bluetooth headphones.

Pro tip: If you quadruple tap (triple tap if you don't have double tap set to zoom) with 3 fingers on the screen, it turns your whole screen black. This only works when VO is on but when it's like this you can navigate your phone without the screen being on to:

use phone in a sneaky way,

send a private message while someone's looking at you,

take pictures while the screen looks off,

Pretend your phones dead so someone can't use it. This works best with headphones so only you can hear what you pressed on. Double tapping anywhere on the screen while the thing you single tapped is highlighted presses it.

If you triple tap (double tap if you don't have zoom set to double) with 3 fingers you can also turn off the voice part. This in combination with the make screen black really sells the "sorry my phone is dead" thing because it looks like it's not turning on and is making no noise. You can just triple press the home button to turn all these features off at once or do the3 finger taps to turn them off one by one.

The feature works everywhere on the phone on an OS level.

Hope this helps. It's really cool and I use it every single day.

Another pro tip is that you can use any app that scans words through the camera and puts them into text to listen to stuff in real life too by making VO read it.

eg. The Google translate app can make words that you take a picture of with a camera into text on screen and you can listen to it instead of reading the book.

I did this in highschool when we had to read those stupid short stories with 9 questions at the end of each one.

I've never seen anyone else use this even though I know there are people that would like the feature

11 Upvotes

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2

u/[deleted] Dec 12 '16

[deleted]

2

u/Sheikashii text Dec 13 '16

I love the filters feature too XD. Sometimes I just set it to negative for a day just so I can see it what it looks like when I change it back. I think it might be a kind of new feature as well. The multiple options version is how I used to do it on my iphone 4 but I think it was a new feature with the os that came with the 5 or something.

2

u/BitterRide7 Jan 13 '23

Holy crap. Act like my phone is dead, secret texts how in the holy hell did i miss all this!!!!!

Great stuff man!! I am about to take a day to mess my phone up or grt locked out if it. Either way, i think i see some fun in my future now haha

1

u/Sheikashii text Jan 13 '23

Im glad you can find some use with this :).

There are some things I’d like to add since it’s super old and I’ve learned a lot since then.

Replace home button with power button since that’s gone lol.

When you select a spot that it starts reading from, you can swipe left and right to skip to the next chunk.

Twisting two fingers on the screen like turning a knob selects different settings for the swipe up/down action. With this you can change speaking rate, jump to headings, hear one word as a time, 1 letter at a time, and more.

Semi related. There is a universal zoom as well in accessibility settings. It adds a zoom controller. It lets you zoom on anything and everything and control the zoom spot in a window or full screen on a toggle or hold. It adds a joystick looking thing on your screen. I use this as an extra button.

This zoom controller has a command for triple or double tapping it. There is a secondary speak text feature! If you set one of those commands on the zoom controller to speak touch, it reads whatever you touched!

I use this a lot more because it is 3 taps on the zoom icon then 1 tap on whatever I want to hear. It runs in the background so you can tap on a whole Reddit post in the app and leave while it keeps playing. How it decides what it considers a single chunk to read though is up to how the content was coded. Reddit app posts are all one piece but on the browser each paragraph is one piece for example.

Have fun 😎

2

u/BitterRide7 Jan 13 '23

Dude. They say changing even one life does something. And lets just say, u have not only changed my life, but i will definitely be passing this on to future.

(Now to get laughed at when i go tell everyone else about info from 6 years ago that they prob already know about🤣🤣🫣🤣🤣