Read Anything Out Loud using Goodreader

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share my trick for getting just about anything read out loud to you using the Goodreader app for iPhone or iPad. 

I really like the convenience of having things read out loud to me.  I spend A LOT of time in my car driving my kids to activities and practices. I also like to make use of the time I spend doing mindless chores like unloading the dishwasher, raking leaves, or cleaning the house.  I listen to books on tape with Audible and I’m fully addicted to podcasts, which I listen to using the Stitcher app, you can see my video on that if you are interested. But sometimes I want something else read to me — an article, a lengthy email, my notes from a class, or a webpage.

iOS does have a way to do this.  You can highlight text in almost any app and choose the Speak option. The problem for me is that there is no way to control it once it gets going. You have to go into the operating system settings to control how fast it speaks and there is not a way to pause or resume.  That is why I use the Goodreader app to read things out loud.  

The first thing you need to do is get whatever document or text that you want to be read aloud into the Goodreader app.  There are a bunch of ways to do this:

• PDF - if your document is already a PDF, choosing the Share option in any app will give you the option to copy the PDF to Goodreader
• Webpage - you can pull webpages directly from Goodreader, but I find that doesn’t give you the options you need. Instead, within Safari, I first simplify the webpage if I can using Reader View, which strips ads and other distractions from the page. Then I choose Share. You can see Share isn’t giving me the option to copy to Goodreader since this isn’t a PDF. So instead a choose Print, then pinch out, which is a tip for creating a PDF from this print file. Now that it is in PDF format, I can choose Share and Copy to Goodreader.
• Email - I use the same technique to send emails to GoodReader. Share, Print, pinch out, Share again, and copy to Goodreader. And finally,
• Text — you can paste text directly into Goodreader by creating a text file. Within the app, under Manage Files, choose New TXT.  Name the document — I’m naming this one Test and here is your blank document.  Make sure you have already copied the text you want read to you, select anywhere on the document and paste.

Okay — now that your document is in Goodreader, you can select a highlighted passage or if you want the whole page read, push to select in an area where there is no text and choose Speak.  You will see this nifty control panel will come up.  In a text document, you can’t highlight text, so there is a speak button down here which performs the same function.

First of all, the highlight follows what is being read like a bouncing ball at a sing along.  You can use these two sliding ____ to change the volume and the voice speed. You can also pause and resume.  Pushing the jump ahead or jump back buttons will go to the next paragraph — although this tends to be a little weird in PDFs, since they use Optical Character Recognition and don’t differentiate well between paragraph breaks and wrapped text.  You can choose to read the current page or all pages and hitting the Stop button stops the read aloud and closes out the control panel. 

Clearly, the robotic voice is not nearly as good as a human reading, but it allows me to finish my reading on my way to class and read articles that I might not otherwise get to.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!