Listen2 Developer Here - Introducing myself and Happy to Hear Feedback

Hello everyone,
DARIA here. I was asked to enter an app submission for Listen2 after Zach and I spent so much time working on it together over the last few weeks. That submission will be coming soon expected in the next day or two.
Thank you.

Hi Zach,

Welcome to AppleVis, and thank you so much for taking the time to introduce yourself here. It's always wonderful to see a developer who is genuinely committed to improving the accessibility of their app.

I've been trying out Listen2 and wanted to share a few observations from my initial experience.

The first is a performance issue I've noticed when listening to any EPUB file on my iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 26.3.1. The phone becomes very warm quite quickly and the battery drains noticeably faster than when I use comparable apps such as Voice Dream Reader. I've tested both the App Store release and the current TestFlight build and experience the same behaviour on both, so it doesn't appear to be specific to one version. It also doesn't appear to be specific to the voice being used.

My second point is a feature request: I'd love to see the maximum playback speed increased. Many members of the blind and low-vision community are accustomed to consuming spoken content at quite high speeds, and I suspect this would be a popular addition with a good number of AppleVis members.

An issue I wanted to flag concerns the playback progress slider that appears on the lock screen. When using VoiceOver, rather than announcing the current playback position, the slider always reads as zero percent regardless of where you are in the audio. This means it isn't possible to get a sense of your progress through the content, or to use the slider to navigate, without unlocking the device and going to the app.

Finally, I'd love to see the app display the total listening duration of a document. When opening a new book, it would be really useful to know upfront whether it's a five-hour or ten-hour listen. Building on this, it would be even better if the app could also show the amount already listened to and the time remaining — and ideally both figures would automatically reflect the currently selected playback speed, so that they remain accurate however fast or slowly you choose to listen.

Thanks again for reaching out and for your willingness to listen to feedback. I'm looking forward to seeing Listen2 continue to develop.

hello,
I thought I would post to clarify a couple of things for VoiceOver users. A couple of tricks to help with the battery drain are to turn off highlighting altogether or switch it to sentence mode. By default the app uses Word level highlighting. Second, unless you absolutely require your screen be active while reading use your screen curtain this will decrease battery usage. As to the progress bar comment that progress bar is not currently set up for navigation purposes with VoiceOver. I just checked in the app to be sure of this but that progress bar does not read as anything other than an indicator of the time through the document for lock screen navigation use your previous and next buttons if your navigation settings are set to paragraph it will move forward and back by paragraph if it is set to sentence it will move forward and back by sentence. hope this helps.

Thank you for these suggestions, they are very much appreciated.

My early testing does suggest that turning off highlighting makes a difference. The phone still gets a little warmer than when using Voice Dream Reader, but nowhere near as warm as it did before I made the change. I have to admit I was somewhat surprised by this result, as I was experiencing this behaviour even when my phone was locked with the screen off. I hadn't expected that word-level highlighting would seemingly still be doing something in the background consuming power under those circumstances.

Regarding the progress bar, you mention that it reads as "an indicator of the time through the document" — could you clarify whether it is literally reporting time for you? On my phone, VoiceOver only announces a percentage value rather than a time. I'm wondering whether you are seeing different behaviour somewhere different to where I am looking, or whether something in the app settings needs to be changed to achieve time-based reporting. Any clarification on this would be very helpful.

No problem. The progress bar does only show the percentage through the document at this point. I have raised the issue with the developer and I’m aware that he’s working on it. Something I do to get around this for the time being until it is dealt with is to import the document. I’m reading into another app that does show time codes get it read of it and then go back to The document in the app I prefer. It’s a little bit roundabout but it does work particularly if you seek to the same position in the document with the app that shows the time code whether you use Voice Dream or Speech Central or something else. I think the difference between this app and most traditional apps like Voice Dream or Speech Central is that these don’t use larger speech models. I don’t know if you were an NVDA user or what version of it you’re running if you do but if you have access to someone’s computer with NVDA running you can try installing the Sonata neural voices add on for NVDA to get a better understanding of how the piper TTS mobile in particular works. There’s only one other app right now that uses the super tonic TTS and that one is called Page echo. Regardless this is the best one I’ve found for on device Neural TTS that I don’t think either eats up too much of my battery or makes me want to cringe because of the strange inflections. It helps that Zach opened up the phoneme and expressiveness controls for Piper and did something similar for supertonic in The beta. The highlighting does tend to nibble on the battery though more so with word level highlighting than with sentence level. I don’t use either one so having it completely turned off does not bother me in the slightest. For anyone using this app who requires highlighting unless you need the word level highlighting or just don’t care about battery drain sentence level works just fine. There are a few bugs with the highlighting from what I’m aware of but they will likely be fixed in the next few versions.

Thanks for asking, Zach. Personally, I suspect my own sweet spot would be around 3.0x, though I'm aware that many others in the community would still consider that relatively slow! I know from other discussions here on AppleVis that pushing these synthesised voices to higher speeds can introduce undesirable side effects in terms of audio quality and behaviour, so there may be a practical ceiling to what is achievable, but even a modest increase would be welcome.

I also wanted to mention one further issue I've noticed. I have Siri configured to announce notifications on my AirPods Pro 3, and my experience with Listen2 is that although playback correctly pauses when a notification is being read out, it doesn't automatically resume once the announcement has finished. Resuming after a notification announcement is expected behaviour in other audio apps, so this is something that may be worth investigating.

Why do so many accessible reading apps seem to assume that blind readers only want to read through the speech controls built into the app itself? Sometimes it feels as if developers think accessibility begins and ends with pressing play and listening.
But that is not how many of us actually read.
I want to read using my own VoiceOver controls. I want to move through text the way I normally do: by paragraph, sentence, word, or even character when needed. I want to use my braille display naturally. I want to highlight passages, add bookmarks, write notes, export those notes later, and return exactly to where I stopped reading. Sometimes I need to stay on one section and read it several times because I am studying, reviewing, or working—not simply listening to a novel for entertainment.
Apps like Speech Central and Readify still miss much of this. They often lock the reading experience inside their own controls, as if built-in speech is the only thing that matters. But reading is much more than listening. Sometimes I need precision, annotation, and full control over navigation.
Not every reading session is about casually consuming a book. Sometimes I need to examine a paragraph carefully, compare sections, mark important points, and come back to them later. That is difficult when the app limits how text can be explored.
Accessibility should not mean replacing system accessibility tools with something narrower. It should mean giving users the freedom to read in the way that works best for them.

Hello,
I very much appreciate what you are saying. I am actually deaf Blind so there are times when I definitely need to review text right along with listening to it. When I need to do this, I have started using the app Vox libri it does have speech controls built into the app but it also has settings to allow you to put it into essentially a braille display mode. We all have different tools for different things. And we alternate those tools to meet the needs of the moment. I find Vox libri useful for when I need to use a braille display and want to be able to control my text through VoiceOver exclusively by contrast, I find Listen2 Readify or Speech Central useful for when I need to be able to understand what I’m reading but don’t absolutely require text review. To each their own. The other alternative to Vox libri would be the Dolphin EasyReader application like Vox libri this one also has a screen reader mode for use with braille display so it combines both. dolphin EasyReader is free and Vox libri is $5 upfront. I believe there is a submission for it it in the directory. I know there is one for dolphin EasyReader.