Lately, I’ve been so busy that I pass on reading great, and potentially beneficial articles, and other reading, simply because I don’t have time to stop and read. Well, I’ve stumbled upon an article by Tipb.com that I’ve already found of great use, so I thought I would share this handy feature with everyone.

VoiceOver is an accessibility feature built onto your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad to assist people with poor vision. In a nutshell you select what you want read, and it speaks it, surprisingly, quite clear. I just tested it and found it a bit troublesome trying to work it, but given some time, I think It will become by favorite feature on my iPad.

Here is how to enable it:

• Launch Settings
• Select General
• Scroll down and Select Accessibility
• Select VoiceOver
• Tap the toggle switch to enable VoiceOver

Pretty easy right? Well, make sure you familiarize yourself with this feature before exiting the page, as it completely changes the way the device responds to touch commands. For example, now to read an item, simply touch it. To launch an app or link, you must double tap it. To scroll through your home screen or through safari, you must flick three fingers up, down, left or right.

These controls will take some time to get used to, and to be honest will be a pain at first, my best advice is to set it up so that you can turn it on and off quickly by triple clicking the home button:

• Launch Settings
• Select Accessibility
• Select Triple-click Home
• Select Toggle VoiceOver

Now, you can go to safari, and it will start out by telling you the page is loading. From there it will tell you the name of the webpage as soon as it loads enough to display it. In my experience, it repeated it 4 times before saying webpage loaded.

The biggest issue I’ve found with this option, is that you must select each paragraph individually, unless you:

• Turn off VoiceOver
• Hold down on the text as if to copy it,
• Hit select all
• Turn the Feature back on

I noticed that I cannot do this with JohnsiPhone.com, so to that end it is a bit of a let down, but with lots of other sites, and apps, it works well. Also, for some reason, it seems to ignore hyperlinks inside of a paraghraph, unless you individually select them, and it also stops reading at the hyperlink, forcing you to select the sentence fragment leading to the link and then after the link. It seems to not quite be efficient, but overall for me, the annoyance is worth it.

You can also place 2 fingers on the screen, and rotate them clockwise or counter clockwise to bring up what is called a rotor, which allows you to select what you specifically want read on a webpage, I’ve found that it is useless. As I become more used to this feature, I will update with a better tutorial.

What about you, are you used to using VoiceOver? How has your experience been with it? Let me know, and we welcome tips like this from you!