I’m finally learning to cook some decent food, so I need to be able to read recipes. For a while, I was reading them out of Simplenote on my iPhone. However, I encountered several frustrations with this approach (and this applies to any notes or text app really):

• When you’re not editing, Simplenote shows the note such that each line is an item for VoiceOver; i.e. you flick right to read the next line. However, if you bump the screen or perform the wrong gesture accidentally, you can easily lose your position. If the screen locks or you have to switch apps, you lose your position completely, since VoiceOver doesn’t restore focus to the last focused item in apps.
• When editing, you can review the note line by line using the rotor. The advantage here is that the cursor doesn’t get lost when you switch apps or the screen locks. However, lines can be smaller than is ideal due to the screen size, so one recipe instruction might get split across multiple lines. Also, moving the editing cursor with VoiceOver is notoriously buggy, often getting stuck, etc. Finally, again, if you bump the screen or perform the wrong gesture, you can lose your position (or worse, accidentally type text into the document).
• The screen lock problem could be solved by disabling auto lock, but that obviously has an impact on battery.
• Having to repeatedly take my phone out of my pocket to read the next instruction was impractical, especially given the risk of losing my spot in the recipe. Leaving it on a bench somewhere meant I had to keep walking back to wherever my phone was located, which was similarly tedious. This might seem simple enough, but when you’re moving around a lot, using your hands for other things, getting your hands dirty, etc., it just isn’t efficient.

I considered a couple of solutions: