iPad Accessibility

Scanner & Translator App

I recently had a teacher asking for resources to scaffold instruction for students who are having difficulty reading. She was using an iPad app called Scanner & Translator which allowed any text to be digitized and then read aloud. It's a free app, but the drawback was it would start back at the beginning of the text when students really were needing to be able to select where to start.

So I immediately begin to think about the built-in functionality of iPads for accessibility. There is a plethora of accessibility features and one is called Voice Over. As long as the documents are true PDFs and not just a photo, the iPad will read the text. And yes, you can tap where you want it to read!
My thoughts are to encourage sharing of the PDFs with students through Google Classroom or Google Drive. Students then can open that PDF in iBooks and use Voice Over to read aloud.

I found this great resource online to show how to access it and how it works. It does change the normal touch features of an iPad, but I'm sure students can handle the changes.