Last updated: April 3, 2023
Once you’ve opened a book for the first time, you will be on its “Navigating Mode” screen. From here, you can find buttons to show “Bookmarks,” the “Table of Contents,” and change “Appearance Settings.” There are other buttons to navigate through the book, but as a screen reader user, we would ignore them in favour of navigating using the “Accessible Reading” mode. The “Dismiss Navigation” button will exit this screen.
If you end up in “Page Mode,” you will find that there are few buttons, and you can’t read the book's contents. The button you want to double-tap here is “Read from Here.” This opens “Read Aloud Mode.” VoiceOver will also tell you that you can double-tap with two fingers on the turn page control, and this will also open “Read Aloud Mode.”
“Read Aloud Mode” does not, as the name suggests, read the book to you using a separate voice. What it does is let VoiceOver read it. You can read by paragraph, word, letter, or any other way you’re used to reading text with VoiceOver. The “Previous Part” and “Next Part” buttons let you easily move backward and forward in the book. If you want to jump to a bookmark or a different section without browsing for it part by part, double-tap the “Menu” button and then either the “Contents” or “Bookmarks” button.
Demonstration 1. Reading a book.
Try it out: Read the first parts of a book. This will probably include the cover page and publisher information.
You might sometimes come across parts of a book that seem to be blank. This happens when a page has no text, either because it’s blank or because it has an illustration or other graphic. Your phone and VoiceOver are working properly. Double-tap “Next Part” to move past it.
Demonstration 2. Jumping ahead to a chapter of a book and starting to read it.
Try it out: Go into the menu and use the “Table of Contents” to jump to the Prologue or Chapter 1 of your chosen book.
Related Libby VoiceOver Tutorials:
- Using Libby on iOS with VoiceOver Tutorials
- Searching Libby
- Learn More about a Book
- Reading Audiobooks
- Reading Magazines