You don’t need to pay for an Audible subscription to have your iPhone read books to you. By enabling an accessibility setting, you can make your iPhone read the text of whatever it is you have open, from a book in iBooks to an article you have open in Safari or another app. This setting is also available on iPads. It’s not a perfect replacement for Audible, though, since artificial intelligence does the reading instead of a human being. You do have options, however, for the type of voice and language you’d like to hear. It could prove useful if you have poor eyesight or impaired vision, obviously, but it could also come in handy for times when you’re just tired of staring at your iPhone screen, whether you are reading in a dark room and can’t dim your screen enough or attempting to walk. To enable this setting, go to:
Settings
General
Accessibility
Speech
Speak Screen
With this enabled, you can swipe down with 2 fingers from the top edge of your screen and a voice will begin reading whatever text is on the screen. A small control panel will appear with options.
Tip of the month
Fixing your internet connection
It’s a good idea to periodically restart your router and cable/dsl modem. Some are all in ones, some are independent of each other. Regardless, this would keep your connection performing well. These steps are also worth performing before calling your service provider to see if your internet service (ATT or Charter) is down.
Unplug your router and modem. Let them stay off at least a minute or two.
Plug the modem back in first and wait for most of the lights to be a solid green. After they stop blinking, plug in the router.
Be patient and wait another few minutes for them to completely reset. The reboot will hopefully fix the situation.
