As part of Apple’s accessibility features to assist those with visual impairments, your iPhone has a built-in screen reader called VoiceOver.
That’s cool! But how does it work? Essentially, VoiceOver describes everything that appears on your iPhone screen aloud. This includes detailed descriptions of text, people, objects and other graphics. It also utilises haptics and gestures to help users navigate their iPhone, without ever looking at the screen.
Although originally designed to help blind and low-vision users, VoiceOver can also be helpful in many other ways. VoiceOver can be used with the Kindle app for users who prefer listening to books.
How to enable VoiceOver
- Head to Settings
- Tap Accessibility
- Under the Vision heading, select VoiceOver
- Tap the VoiceOver toggle to enable
It’s important to note that VoiceOver uses a different set of gestures to control your iPhone. This means you’ll have to double-tap instead of single-tap an object to interact with it. There’s a slight learning curve, but Apple has a VoiceOver Practice option to help you get familiar with it.
Customising VoiceOver
VoiceOver is also super customisable, so you can tweak speaking rate, voice profiles and outputs to braille displays. You can also personalise Verbosity, which determines how much speech feedback you hear. Head over to the VoiceOver settings to get started.
Source: The Verge
