VoiceOver Reading of PDFs in iBooks different in iOS5?

By RJ, 12 October, 2011

Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Hi. i'm new to the site and love it. Been using iOS's accessibility since the beginning, and I got used to iOS 4. But now I've found something weird, and I hope the community can explain what's going on. I bought an eBook (in PDF format) about a month ago and used iBooks to read it as I could utilize the full feature set of Voice Over unlike in Good Reader. I was able to drag one finger anywhere on the document and choose what to read, then drag two fingers down to read from there. In the new release of iOS 5, the only thing I can do is start from the beginning of every page. I can still do this in Safari with web pages, using 1 finger to choose a spot and swiping with a finger to go word by word/section by section or 2 fingers down to read continuously, etc. But not in iBooks. Is this a setting I just had on before and didn't know. Or is this a new implementation of how PDFs are read in iBooks and I'm screwed? Thanks, RJ

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Comments

By AnonyMouse on Monday, October 24, 2011 - 10:10

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team
No, you are not going nuts. Yes, as I have upgraded to IOS 5.00 myself and found that the iBook has changed how it functioned. You are correct. You can't select any part of that page anymore. Least that is what it is doing to me. No matter where I select on the page it keeps re-reading from the very part of that page. So you are not screwed as you want to say. We are both screwed so it isn't just you! I could find anything that would change to fix this problem. I am also discoverying one by one some minor glitches to certain apps as well that once functioned just fine before. Let just hope for now everyone will soon upgrade their apps including this iBook to work better on IOS 5.00.

By RJ on Monday, October 24, 2011 - 10:10

Heard back from the accessibility team and they noted the issue. Quick response and they even thanked me. Pretty neat for my first interaction with them.