Last updated: April 24, 2023

The first time you open an ebook, a tutorial will pop up. That tutorial isn’t very VoiceOver friendly, both in accessing the information and how relevant the information is to a VoiceOver user. We recommend just double-tapping “Skip Tutorial.” You have a tutorial designed for VoiceOver users right here, after all.

If you explore the “Ebook Reader” screen, you’ll find the contents of the currently visible page taking up most of the screen, with a section at the bottom carved out for buttons to move to the previous and next pages. There’s also a label which tells you how many pages are in the current chapter and which of those pages you’re on, and a horizontal scroll bar. Ignore this scroll bar; whatever it’s supposed to do, VoiceOver doesn’t work with it properly, and setting it to anything other than 0% makes the contents of the current page disappear.

The “Ebook Reader” has other buttons, but you can’t find them by exploring the screen. To find them using VoiceOver, you have to swipe right from the end of the current page’s contents or swipe left from the “Previous Page” button. This is how you get to the table of contents, searching the book, reading settings, creating bookmarks, and more options. This is also where you’ll find the button to close the book.

To read through the contents of the current page, you use standard VoiceOver navigation and reading gestures. Remember that reading gestures, such as swiping up with two fingers to read the entire screen or swiping down with two fingers to read from the current position, will also make VoiceOver read the buttons on the screen. Unfortunately, there’s no way to have VoiceOver only read the entire page at once. The most efficient way to read is to locate the top of the page and swipe down with two fingers to continuously read or manually swipe right to advance to each paragraph. However, you might prefer swiping up with two fingers, hearing buttons before the start of the page but not having to locate the top of the content first. Try all three options and decide what works for you.

There is also no way to read an entire chapter at once; you have to read page by page. Double-tapping the “Next Page” button will flip to the next page. When the page flips, VoiceOver will read which page within the current chapter you just flipped to. However, if you do this while your device is in portrait orientation, you’ll hear two-page flips. If you double-tap “Previous Page,” you’ll also hear two-page flips. VoiceOver isn’t lying to you; you are turning two pages instead of one. As you might imagine, this makes reading a book nearly impossible.

This is the final important thing you need to know to be able to read ebooks with VoiceOver: you need to do it in landscape orientation. To do this, rotate your device sideways. If it doesn’t switch to landscape, go to your device’s control centre and disable the “Lock Orientation” setting if it is not already off. If it still doesn’t switch, you must disable the lock orientation setting in the Kobo app. This is found in the reading settings; swipe to and double-tap “Open Reading Settings,” then swipe right through all visual options to the ”Lock Orientation” switch button. Ironically, this is the only button on this screen that doesn’t tell VoiceOver if it’s on or off, but you can double-tap it. Then find the unlabelled control at the top of the screen, which is the “Close” button, and double-tap it. Rotating your device should now cause it to switch to landscape.

Demonstration 1. Reading ebooks in Kobo with VoiceOver and rotating your screen orientation to landscape. 

Once you have the Kobo app in landscape orientation, reenter reading settings and double-tap the “Lock Orientation” switch button. This will lock orientation again, except now it’ll be locked to landscape, so ebooks will always display this way. If you prefer to keep your device locked to portrait mode for anything that doesn’t require landscape, you can exit the app, rotate back to portrait and re-enable lock orientation in the control centre. Even with the device locked to portrait, Kobo will now be set to display ebooks in landscape and will switch when you want to read.

There are other ways to navigate to specific parts of a book. Double-tapping “Open Table of Contents” does just that, and you can double-tap any of the chapters listed on that screen to jump to it. You can also switch to the Annotations tab, where any bookmarks you’ve set will be listed. Back on the reader screen, bookmarks can be set by swiping to the “Create Bookmark” button and double-tapping. The “Search In Book” button opens a screen with a text field where you can type a phrase, then double-tap “Search” on the keyboard to bring up a list of places where that phrase appears. You can then double-tap any of the results to jump to the relevant page.
You should now be able to read through an ebook without skipping pages. It is still inefficient, though, and there isn’t much more VoiceOver users can do to improve it further. Hopefully, Kobo will make improvements in the future, such as adding the ability to read an entire chapter at once and being able to read in whatever display orientation we like.

Demonstration 2. Reading an ebook in Kobo in landscape. 

Instruction Summary

1. Double tap on an ebook on your bookshelf or the “Read” button on its details screen.
2. Rotate your device to switch to landscape orientation.
3. If your device doesn’t switch to landscape orientation when rotated sideways, open the control centre and locate the “Lock Orientation” switch button if it’s on, double-tap to turn it off.
4. If your device still doesn’t switch to landscape orientation when rotated sideways, return to the Kobo app and either swipe right from the book contents or swipe left from the “Previous Page” button. Swipe until you find “Open Reading Settings,” double-tap it, then swipe right to “Lock Orientation,” and double-tap. Now double-tap the unlabelled close button at the top of the screen.
5. Optional: Repeat step 4 with your device in landscape orientation to lock the Kobo app to only display ebooks in landscape.
6. Optional: Rotate your device back to portrait orientation and re-enable the orientation lock in the control centre if you’d prefer everything else to remain in portrait.
7. Back on the “Ebook Reader” screen, read by swiping up with two fingers or by manually locating the start of the contents and either swiping down with two fingers to read all or swiping right through it. Try all three methods and decide which you prefer.
8. When you’ve read everything on the page, double-tap the “Next Page” button.
9. Optional: Swipe through the screen to access the table of contents, book search, and bookmark features if you want to use them.

Related Tutorial Pages

1. Using the Kobo Books app for iOS with VoiceOver
2. Accessing Kobo
3. Searching for Content
4. Browsing for Content
5. Reading Audiobooks
6. Browsing your Bookshelf