Bon Adamson
Whether it be ads or shoddy formatting, some web pages might not be that easy to decipher. Thankfully, there is a solution built right into Safari on your iPad.
Whatever your reasons may be, something about a website just may not jibe with your eyes, and that is precisely where Reader Mode on Safari comes in. Reader Mode makes getting past this issue a breeze and makes reading articles on your iPad much more pleasant.
How to use Reader Mode in Safari
Actually opening up Reader Mode is very simple, and quite literally requires just two taps. With any largely text-based web page open in Safari, you need only tap on the "Aa" icon in the left-hand side of your address bar. Once that's been tapped, you'll see the option to "Show Reader." Once you've tapped "Show Reader" the web page will convert into a succinct block of text with pictures intact.
The "Show Reader" option is available on almost every primarily text-based web page. For websites like Instagram or Amazon, Reader Mode wouldn't do anything worthwhile for you even if you could enable it.
When entering Reader Mode, all the ads and suggested content from any given website will be stripped out in favor of a succinct reading experience. With that in mind, there are still some issues you can bump into. Some webpages, despite being mostly text, won't show up properly. In some instances this can be due to how the website is written, and in others it may just be that the text on the page is embedded within an image.
Another issue that can crop is multi-paged articles and how they "cooperate" with Reader Mode. For the most part, Reader Mode will only show you the first page of a multi-paged article when turned on. For these kinds of pages, you will have to turn Reader Mode on and off to progress through the article.
How to customize Reader Mode in Safari
Once you're in Reader Mode, you may find yourself wanting to make a few cosmetic adjustments. Doing so is as simple as returning to the menu you used to open Reader Mode. Once you have the menu opened up, you'll be greeted with a few key options, including:
- Adjusting the font
- Adjusting the font size
- Changing the background color
- Individual website settings
All of these options do exactly what it sounds like they would do. The individual website settings don't offer much that pertains to Reader Mode, but there is one absolutely game changing setting you can enable here.
That setting is "Use Reader Automatically." What this option will do is make it to where Safari automatically displays pages from that website in Reader Mode. Pages that can't normally be viewed in Reader Mode will still show up as normal, but the moment you enter a page that can be viewed in Reader Mode, the change will happen automatically.
With Reader Mode in your arsenal, you'll have a much better reading experience across the web on your iPad.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
1 Comment
Do you people even try this feature cause it still doesn't work properly for your site. Kind of hilarious you're telling us how to use a feature that your site does not properly support. Whatever is in your formatting does not show bullet points or other special elements in Reader mode. And has not for months. I even tried emailing you but seems nobody is listening or cares over there. I stopped reading your site because it doesn't support Reader mode properly. For example in this article the 4 bullet points do not show when enabling reader mode.