There have been a number of packages landing in the Cydia store that offer alternative ways to handle the banner notifications that were introduced by Apple as part of iOS 5. There was a definite need for the notifications system to be changed and the introduction of banner notifications is a step forward but some users feel they need to be made bigger to display the full text or have some additional customization options applied to them. If having the alert of the title read out to you in a Siri voice was on your wish list then the TitleSpeak package is probably right up your street.
TitleSpeak falls into the category of doing exactly as it says on the tin, with an incoming banner alert invoking an audible tone that reads the title of that notification alert. This installation would be perfect as a native accessibility option for the visually impaired but should definitely provide some real-world benefit to those jailbroken users who use the device a lot when driving or can’t otherwise check where notifications are coming from immediately.
Although the functionality included within the tweak is extremely simple and does exactly as intended, I can’t help feel that the package feature set should have been extended a little further to offer a little more power of notifications. Whenever a banner is received on the device the title of that notification is generally limited to the name of the sending application. As an example, if someone comments on an Instagram photograph that produces an alert, the title of the received banner would simply be Instagram. Reading the name of the application out to the user is a neat little touch, but it doesn’t really provide any tangible benefit.
The important information is what is actually included within the notification, part of which is obstructed by the fact that the display is only 320 points wide and therefore can’t display the full text of the banner. Rather than have to invoke the alert to see what is going on, it would be extremely beneficial if this tweak could be extended to also read out the body of the message.
TitleSpeak is available as a free of charge download from BigBoss repository and requires iOS 5 or above.
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