How to have your iPhone read a PDF aloud

1. 1

   Turn on Speak Screen

   Open Settings › Accessibility › Spoken Content and turn on Speak Screen.

2. 2

   Open your PDF

   Open the PDF in Files, Books or wherever you keep it.

3. 3

   Swipe down with two fingers

   From the top of the screen, swipe down with two fingers. Your iPhone starts reading what's on screen and turns the pages as it goes.

4. 4

   Use the controls

   A small panel lets you pause, skip and change the speed. Under Voices in the same settings you can choose and download other voices.

Speak Screen is free and works in almost any app. It reads what is on screen, though, exactly as laid out: page headers, page numbers, footnote markers and citations all get read aloud. If you close the PDF, you start again from the screen you're on.

Leola is a text-to-speech app built like a music player. A PDF becomes an item in your library that you can queue, put in a playlist and resume later.

1. 1

   Import the PDF

   In Leola, tap Add › Import a PDF and pick the file.

2. 2

   Press play

   Leola skips footnotes, citation brackets, page headers and page numbers, so you hear the text and not the layout.

3. 3

   Follow along or put the phone away

   The sentence being read is highlighted. Lock the screen and keep listening, with the controls on the lock screen.

4. 4

   Come back later

   Leola remembers the exact sentence where you stopped, in every document.

• PDFs with real text (you can select a word): yes. Papers, reports, ebooks without DRM, class handouts.
• Scanned PDFs (pictures of pages): not yet. Leola can only read PDFs that contain text.
• Password-protected PDFs: remove the password first in the app that created them.