iPhone 13 VoiceOver/Speak Screen not reading after iOS 26

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Yanlina Author

Level 1

19 points

iPhone 13 VoiceOver/Speak Screen not reading after iOS 26

Iphone 13. Speak screen and Voiceover do not read out loud after update to ios 26

iPhone 13, iOS 26

Posted on Dec 12, 2025 4:10 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 12, 2025 2:59 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

As a workaroumd, I paste the article into a note and I ask Siri to read it. It works pretty well. This spoken content feature is insanely unreliable and never works right, it always stops or simply refuses to read the content. Apple always breaks this feature on every iOs update and they don’t care about fixing it; so unfortunate. Ironically, Siri handles this job a lot better than that lousy Accessibility feature that Apple always shows off

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Answer 2

Yanlina Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 12, 2025 12:47 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Update: restarted phone again, turned features off and on, started working and my shortcuts with Speak Screen command also started working.

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Answer 3

Alancito

Level 7

29,952 points

Dec 12, 2025 4:50 AM in response to Yanlina

Yanlina ~ Your iPhone 13 could be >4 years old and the long process of applying a major iOS upgrade to an iPhone with a weak, aging battery can be the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back." (And a weak battery may not be able to power iPhone's speaker.) So...

Does your iPhone 13 still have its original battery?

And what's the Maximum Capacity % here?...

Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging

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Answer 4

Yanlina Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 12, 2025 6:03 AM in response to Alancito

My phone was just fine before the update. Battery has nothing to do with it. I never drain it because I don’t play games on my phone, so it’s perfectly fine. I listen to books every day, now that feature is screwed up by another update..

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Answer 5

Dec 12, 2025 7:48 AM in response to Yanlina

The guide for iOS 26 introduces a new feature for iOS 26 not discussed in the guide for previous versions -- Accessibility Reader

Accessibility Reader: Turn on Accessibility Reader to read or listen to text in a full-screen view, and customize fonts, layouts, and background colors. Turn on Autoplay if you want Accessibility Reader to automatically read text aloud.

See Read or listen to text in apps with Accessibility Reader on iPhone.

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Answer 6

Yanlina Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 12, 2025 4:37 PM in response to Manullascard488

Thanks, that’s a good idea for a smaller size text. Last time Speak screen stopped flipping pages and only read 1 page and then would stop, I created a shortcut for it and it worked. I also made a shortcut so it reads for 15 min then stops - for bedtime.

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Answer 7

Dec 12, 2025 5:20 PM in response to Yanlina

How did you create the shortcut and what did you do so it can stop itself at bedtime? Do you use the clock app to set the sleep timer? Apparently it only works for music, but I’m not really sure if it also interrupts the TTS functions

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Answer 8

Yanlina Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 13, 2025 6:17 AM in response to Manullascard488

It was tricky because Speak Screen did not have a “stop” command. But I realized that if you close kindle, it will finish reading the page then stop automatically, so I put a ‘wait’ command for 1800 seconds)) then ‘Go Home’, see picture. Also, after using it for a while and Kindle sometimes starting slow, had to add a 3 seconds wait before it starts reading, otherwise it would say ‘no speakable content’. Anyway, the way it is, it reads for 15 minutes, then stops. I see now Speak screen has a Stop command, i might redo the shortcut.

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Answer 9

Yanlina Author

Level 1

19 points

Dec 12, 2025 12:28 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Did that. The Speak Screen if activated on a web page does not work at all, in ibooks or kindle just flips pages then crashes.

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