OplæsHow to have your iPhone read a PDF aloud
Open the PDF in Files, Books or Mail and swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen. Your iPhone then reads the page aloud with Speak Screen, which you turn on once under Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak (Spoken Content on iOS 17 and 18). It’s free and built in, and it speaks many languages. It reads what’s on the screen, page headers and page numbers included, and a scanned PDF without a text layer may give it nothing to read.
Step by step: Speak Screen
- Open Settings, tap Accessibility, then Read & Speak. On iOS 17 and 18 it’s called Spoken Content.
- Turn on Speak Screen. You only do this once.
- Open the PDF, for example in Files, in Books or as an attachment in Mail.
- Swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen.
A small controller appears, where you can pause, change the speed and skip back or forward. You can also ask Siri to “Speak screen”. These steps are from Apple’s guide Hear iPhone speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback.
Just one paragraph: Speak Selection
- In the same menu, turn on Speak Selection.
- In the PDF, touch and hold a word, then drag the handles over the text you want to hear.
- Tap Speak.
When a scanned PDF stays silent
A PDF made by scanning paper is often just pictures of the pages, with no text inside. Try to select a word: if you can’t, Speak Screen has nothing to read. The PDF first needs text recognition (OCR), which many scanner apps can add. Skan, by the developer behind this site, explains it in how to make a scanned PDF searchable. Oplæs, below, recognises the text on scanned pages by itself.
What Speak Screen also reads
Speak Screen reads what’s on the screen, so in a PDF it also reads the running headers, page numbers and footnotes on every page. It doesn’t remember where you stopped, so in a long document you find your place yourself next time. Voice and speed are under Settings › Accessibility › Read & Speak, in Voices and Speaking Rate.
When an app does it better
For long English or Danish PDFs there’s Oplæs, the app behind this website. Share a PDF to Oplæs from Files or Mail, or add it with the + button. It reads the PDF’s text, recognises the text on scanned pages, leaves out the headers and footers that repeat on every page, highlights each word as it’s read and remembers where you stopped. The voices run on the iPhone, so your PDFs never leave it, and reading works offline once the voices have downloaded (about 1.2 GB, on a recent iPhone).
Oplæs costs $1.99 once, with no ads, no subscription and no account. Comparing apps? See Speechify alternatives for iPhone, or how to make your iPhone read any text aloud.
Reading in Apple Books? See how to make Apple Books read aloud.