Kathy Martin, our learning specialist, asked me today if we could setup an iPad for a student so text would be read to him. It turns out you can. Now my thoughts have been racing with ideas on how this technology can be used. For example, it would be great to use with our lower school students when doing research. Here are some things I learned. Under Accessibility features, you can turn on Speak Selection and Speak Screen to have text read to you from many apps such as Email, Safari, iBooks, News, Google Keep, Keynote, etc. For those apps that don't allow you to use Speak Selection and Speak Screen (such as Google Docs, Slides, and Kindle), you can use VoiceOver. If you use VoiceOver, I highly recommend you setup a shortcut to turn it on and off. | |
Speak Screen When this is turned on, you can swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen to hear the content of the screen. This feature also gives you the ability to rewind, skip forward, slow down and speed up the speech. I noticed that if you leave it up, the controls work for Speak Selection as well. |
Highlight Content If you want students to know what word or sentence is being read, you can turn on highlight content. When "highlight content" is on, you have the following highlighting options:
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VoiceOver VoiceOver can be used for both navigation and reading content from apps. Unless you need to navigate using VoiceOver, I would recommend only turning it on when you are ready to listen to content. You can create a shortcut to turn VoiceOver on and off by triple clicking the home button. You can do this by going to:
| This video is very comprehensive: |