Using the Safari Reader
iFocus@Hadley
Using the Safari Reader
Presented by
Douglas Walker
March 14, 2016
Douglas Walker
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we are going
to be looking at using the Safari Reader, and we’re using
the iPhone 6 Plus in today’s demonstration. Now the
Reader feature is available when we’re using our Safari
app and Safari of course is Apple’s web browsing
software.
Now the Reader feature in Safari is one of those lesser
known features that can really help make reading an
article on the internet so much easier. Now it does this by
eliminating all of the adds or an external clutter on the
website, and that means that we’re only presented with
the article that we want to read and that can be really nice
because it can be very frustrating to have to listen to all of
those redundant links and advertisements at the top of a
©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Page 1 of 5
Using the Safari Reader
webpage, when all we really want to do is to get to our
article and read it.
Okay, so let’s take a look at just how this Reader feature
works, and we’ll do this by launching our Safari app so we
will just flick to Safari and we’ll just single-finger double-tap
to launch Safari. I’ll pause that to keep it from reading
here. Okay, our Safari app has opened and we are
currently on the CNN News website. Now before we’re
able to begin using our reader, we’ll first need to find an
article that we want to read, so how about we find one by
using our rotor to activate our headings. Now I’ve used
the CNN website before and the articles on this website
are laid out by headings, so we’ll just activate our rotor
and we’ll choose headings.
Now if you aren’t yet familiar with how to use the rotor, it is
your lucky day because we have a Hadley YouTube video
called Using the Rotor, and it does a pretty good job at
getting you familiar with exactly how the rotor works so
once you’ve finished watching this video, you might want
to go check that one out as well. Okay, so let’s find an
article and begin reading here so let’s activate our rotor
and choose headings so we’ll just activate our rotor.
Wow. Okay, now we’re ready to find an article and since
we have selected Headings in our rotor, we’ll just begin
flicking down to move by headings, and we’ll do this until
©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Page 2 of 5
Using the Safari Reader
we find an article that we want to read so we’ll just flick
down the page.
Let’s find a happy article here or a positive article, so we’ll
flick down here and keep flicking and we’ll keep flicking
down the page. We’ll find one. I’m looking. Oh, no, okay,
all right, so this has really caught my attention here so this
one looks interesting, so how about we give this one a try
and we’ll just single-finger double-tap to open it but before
we do, let’s talk a little bit about what we’re looking for.
Now once we single-finger double-tap, our article is going
to load, and if our Reader feature is available on that
article, we’ll hear VoiceOver announce Reader available
and that sounds pretty easy, right?
Well, how about let’s just give it a try and let’s just singlefinger double-tap to open this article here so we’ll singlefinger double-tap. All right, we heard VoiceOver announce
that our reader is available, so in the top left corner of our
screen now and just below our status bar, we’ll find our
Reader button so how about we just touch in the top left
corner of our screen here to find this Reader button.
Great and VoiceOver told us that this is of course our
Reader button, and we were also told that activating the
Reader button will show or hide our Safari Reader and this
is exactly what we want, so how about we just singlefinger double-tap to activate our reader so we’ll just single-
©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Page 3 of 5
Using the Safari Reader
finger double-tap. Okay, and I paused it with a two-finger
single-tap there.
Okay, our Safari Reader has opened and we notice that
the links and the advertisements and all of the other clutter
on the screen is now gone, and this is great because
we’re only presented with just our article here for reading,
so all we need to do now is to just flick down our screen
with two fingers to perform our continuous reading gesture
so how about we try that? Let’s just flick down our screen
with two fingers here so we’ll just do that. Okay, and we
just stopped our speech with our two-finger single-tap and
we could get it going again with just another two-finger
single-tap there. That’s our Pause and Play gesture once
we get our continuous Reading gesture going here.
All right, so how great is that? It really is nice to have all of
that other clutter out of the way when we just want to read
an article here. Now it’s important to know that our Safari
Reader isn’t going to be available for every single article
that we encounter but remember, we’ll always hear Safari
announce “reader available” whenever it’s there to be
used.
Okay, our Reader is still open here and we can close it in
one of two ways. We can either perform our Scrub
gesture or we could just go back up to our Reader button
in the top left corner and activate it again, so let’s just
©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Page 4 of 5
Using the Safari Reader
touch our Reader button in the top left corner of our
screen here and there it is so we will just single-finger
double-tap to close or collapse our reader here and we’ll
single-finger double-tap. We’ll pause our speech there.
All right, our reader has closed and we’re right back on our
article right in our webpage here. Okay, using our Safari
Reader is really just as easy as that. It really is one handy
tool that can make reading articles in Safari so much more
enjoyable. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care
and I’ll see you next time.
For more from the iFocus Series, including many other
topics of interest to individuals with vision loss, visit the
Videos@Hadley page on the Hadley Institute for the Blind
and Visually Impaired website at www.hadley.edu.
[End of Audio– 0:08:43]
©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Page 5 of 5