With all the productivity features Google offers in Gmail, it’s getting harder and harder to find excuses for ignoring an email. From focused inboxes and filters, toa handy little compose reply boxautomatically populating under an email, toupcoming AI integrationsthat’ll make drafting emails quicker and easier, we have a lot to look forward to on Google’s email platform.
One criminally underrated feature that users may now stumble upon in the emailing app is Reading Mode. This accessibility app by Google, meant for readers with dyslexia, vision impairment, or other accessibility needs, can cut out distracting elements of a web page like images and graphics. But another feature — its ability to speak the text of a page — is particularly handy now thatGoogle Assistant’s Read Aloud feature is nerfed, and it appears new Gmail functionality has been added to this tool in recent weeks.
We’re not certain how long Reading Mode has been compatible with Gmail emails, but Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii caught the accessibility feature working with Gmail yesterday, February 5. Reading Mode doesn’t mesh with every single email, Russakovskii reported on X, but did work “some long ones.”
Reading Mode is a relatively young Google app, made available in late 2022, so it makes sense that Google is still working to expand the app’s reach to other territories besides text-heavy web pages. According to reporting yesterday from9to5Google,Reading Mode is even inching into the social media space, with plain-text, read-aloud options for Threads and X posts spotted, as well. Google wants users to be well aware that Reading Mode’s new compatibility may well be rocky at best, warning that the feature “may not work well” with social media or email apps.
There are a number of ways to access Reading Mode, which is currently only available on Android phones. The first option is to add Reading Mode to the Quick Settings menu above your notifications. Alternatively, set up a shortcut for Reading Mode in your phone’s accessibility settings. From there, you may choose your preferred action to activate Reading Mode — the standard accessibility button, holding the volume keys, or something under theMore optionslink, like the two-finger swipe suggested by Russakovskii back in December.
