Text Reader Narrator Is there a text to speech app for dyslexia on iPhone?
Text Reader Narrator is a reading aid for people who find long text tiring: it speaks the text and highlights each word as it goes, so you can listen and follow at the same time. It is not a dyslexia treatment and has no dyslexia-specific tools; what it gives you is control over speed, voice and highlight colour.
★ 4.1 (31) What you actually get
Paste a page into the Reader tab and press Play. The voice reads, the current word gets a coloured background, and the text scrolls so that word stays on screen. That is all it does, and it is the part people with reading difficulties usually ask about: hearing a word while seeing it.
Nothing here rewrites text, spaces letters differently or tints the page. Want a dyslexia-friendly layout? Wrong app. Settings has toggles named Reading Mode and Highlight Style that look relevant, but the code reads none of them, so they change nothing.
Set it up for easier following
- Open Settings and tap Highlight Color. Choose from Yellow, Green, Blue, Pink or Orange; a preview shows how the word will look. Pick the one that stands out most in light and dark mode.
- Go to Reader, tap the three-dot menu and choose Paste from Clipboard.
- Tap the speed button, which shows something like 1.0x, to open Speed & Pitch. Under Speed Presets, Study is 0.8x and Normal is 1.0x. The Speed slider under Fine Tuning goes lower if you want it.
- Tap the voice button to open Select Voice and preview a few. The Enhanced and Premium iOS voices are much easier to listen to for a long time than the compact ones; they are downloaded in iOS Settings, and the Voices tab shows the route.
- Press Play and follow the highlight.
Speed, with numbers
The app estimates listening time at 150 words per minute at 1.0x. Free users get 5,000 characters a day, which is 5,000 ÷ 12.5 = 400 seconds, or 6 minutes 40 seconds, at 1.0x, and 8 minutes 20 seconds at 0.8x. That is not much reading, and for someone who replays a lot it runs out fast.
Re-listening is where it bites. Every press of Play counts the whole text again.
| Play | Characters counted | Used today | Remaining |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 1,800 | 1,800 | 3,200 |
| 2nd | 1,800 | 3,600 | 1,400 |
| 3rd | 1,400 | 5,000 | 0 |
| 4th | blocked | 5,000 | 0 |
The third play still reads the whole passage, because the limit is only checked before you press Play. A rewarded ad adds 2,000 characters, up to five a day.
Where it falls short
Pause in the Reader stops the speech, and Play starts again from the top of the text. That can be frustrating for anyone who loses the thread easily. Documents opened from the Documents tab do resume with Continue Reading, but that playback has no on-screen highlighting, only a mini player showing the current word.
- Reading font, size and weight (Font) are Premium. Without Premium the Reader text uses the default font.
- PDF, Word and ePub import are Premium; typed, pasted and .txt text are free.
- Voices are the ones built into iOS. No cloud voices.
- No account, but the free version shows ads, including video ads between sessions.
Questions and answers
Does text to speech help dyslexia?
Is there a free text to speech app for dyslexia?
Can I change the highlight colour?
Does it have a dyslexia font?
Can it read my school PDFs?
More Text Reader Narrator guides
- How to make your iPhone read text out loud
- How to listen to a PDF on your iPhone like an audiobook
- How to listen to an ePub book or Word document on iPhone
- How to scan a page with the document scanner and have it read aloud
- How to save the Reader's text as an audio file you can share
- How to turn your voice into text on iPhone
- How to download Enhanced and Premium voices for text to speech on iPhone
- How to have your iPhone read a web page or article aloud
- How do you slow down text to speech on iPhone?
- All questions about Text Reader Narrator
- Back to Text Reader Narrator