Pocket Aurora Papers
Listen to long letters and contracts instead of reading them on a phone
Some documents are easier to take in by ear: a long letter, a contract, your own notes.
Pocket Aurora Papers is in development and not in the App Store yet.
Why reading on a phone is hard
A scanned page is a picture of A4 paper on a screen a third of its width. Zooming and scrolling across a dense contract loses the thread, and the important clause is usually on page seven.
What makes read-aloud useful
Plain text-to-speech reads everything, including page numbers, headers and the footer on every page. Useful read-aloud tidies the text first: joins sentences broken across pages, drops what repeats, and finds chapters you can jump between.
How Pocket Aurora Papers does it
Listen reads a document's text aloud with your iPhone's own voice. It leaves out page numbers, headers and footers, joins sentences that run across pages and finds the chapters; you can change the speed, set a sleep timer and add bookmarks, and pick up where you left off on any of your devices. The voice is made on the phone, and no audio is saved or exported. While it plays, the document's title and chapter show on your lock screen and on a connected car or headphone display, as with any audio app.
A note on what to scan
Listen is for your own documents and notes, and for texts you are allowed to copy. The legal page says that the law where you live may not allow copying a whole book, even one you own.