I have read in various posts, on multiple platforms, that TalkBack struggles when reading large bodies of text. My question is, is this on Google's version, Samsung's version, or both? How does Prudence handle large bodies of text? What about Jieshuo?
Is there a tried and true method for reading large articles online? Or any specific workarounds?
As the time to upgrade gets closer and closer for me, I find myself with these questions. I want to know that, should I switch over to Android, whether it be to a Pixel, a Samsung, or something obscure like a Nothing phone, I want to be sure that I can do things I enjoy currently on iOS, such as reading news articles, blog posts, And the like.
With regards to alternate screen readers, should I find that large bodies of text work fine with third-party readers, what would be a better platform, or does it really matter? For example, is there any difference in performance between one platform or another, in terms of functionality and accessibility? What about supportive accessible applications, does any one app store have any advantage over another? For example, is there anything in the Google play store, that I cannot find in the galaxy store, or vice versa, and likewise with the more obscure devices?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, especially longtime users of Android. Also, I will update this post if I have more questions. 🙂
Comments
Android VS iOS
I've been using Android for over 10 years, so I can trace the development of accessibility from versions like 2.3 to Android 16. The main issue with the large blocks of text you mentioned is not so much their size, but that these blocks are usually part of some kind of web content (not necessarily in the browser, but perhaps some application displays some content like a web page). At the same time, the user experience with Android Screenreader is fundamentally different, depending on whether the user interacts with the native interface or with web content. On iOS, I can understand that the application uses a web-view to display the interface only by the presence of new items in the VoiceOver rotor, but otherwise the experience of use is practically the same. Whereas on Android Talkback instantly becomes much less responsive, focus may begin to spontaneously jump between elements, and behavior is often observed when swiping to the left, instead of returning focus to the previous element, may move it, say, to the very beginning of the current window, i.e. not even to the first element displayed on the screen, but to what would be the first element if you scrolled to the very top.
Speaking of large articles and the like, on iOS I often read books directly in the browser, i.e. I open a site that shows the entire book as one huge html, then you can find the chapter you need by simply moving through the headings, or, in case of poor layout, using the scroll bar on the right of the page - and VoiceOver continues to be responsive, even on huge pages. On Android, however, firstly, Talkback becomes very slow when trying to navigate through such large pages, which means that some of the gestures for moving, say, between headings, may simply be ignored, or Screenreader will try to do them all, but after I do something else, and secondly, the lack of a scroll bar makes it very difficult to navigate through really huge pages, because... Normal scrolling can behave unpredictably.
To clarify, I currently use an iPhone 16 with iOS 26.3 as my main device, in addition to which I have a Galaxy S25 on Android 16 and One UI 8.0, and both the native Talkback and the Google version are installed as a Screenreader on Samsung. eSpeak NG is used as TTS on both devices; in the case of iOS this has virtually no effect, but on Android this TTS has almost the fastest response time. Finally, in the Google Talkback settings, I tried reducing all types of delay, turning off multi-finger gesture processing, and all the other tips that you can find on the Internet to reduce lag when using Talkback.
In fact, I really like Android for its openness, significantly fewer restrictions and greater customization options. This is why I didn’t use iOS at all for a long time, then, after literally several years with the iPhone SE (first generation), I returned to Android immediately, as it turned out that the next iOS update practically eliminated the possibility of its Jailbreak. But a long period of time with Android as my primary device has shown that even though Google is gradually adding many of VoiceOver's features to Talkback, such as Brail Screen Input, Spell Checking, and Reading Controls, the overall user experience still leaves much to be desired.
For example, the recently presented image descriptions seem fantastic, and I am very sorry that Apple does not have an analogue for VoiceOver (it is not clear why there was so much talk about powerful neural processors in the latest iPhone models, if there are practically no real user scenarios where their potential would be used), but at the same time, in the vast majority of tasks, the iPhone simply allows me to do significantly more and more efficiently than Android in the same scenario.