[ugh]

iOS has VoiceOver. Every app should support text to speech, at least if the developer didn’t completely ignore accessibility. I’m just now testing with Instapaper and VoiceOver seems to work perfectly with it.

I don’t know whether that’s default, but I set my iPad up in a way that pressing the home button three times activates VoiceOver. You then select what you want VoiceOver to read to you. If you want it to just continue reading forever (instead of just reading what you selected, like a headline or a paragraph) you scroll down with two fingers.

It’s an accessibility feature, so its primary use case is not reading texts to you, but it works perfectly fine for that purpose – and in the vast majority of apps it just works, even without the developer doing anything.

[omaranto]

Oh, thanks! I can't believe I never thought of poking around in the accessibility features to look for TTS. What I used instead on my iPod Touch was a dedicated TTS app (whose name I can't remember right now): to hear an Instapaper article, for example, I'd copy the entire thing to the clipboard (which was a little inconvenient since there didn't seem to be a "select all" command) and then paste it in to the TTS app. If I ever go back to iOS, I'll be sure to remember this tip.