Help iOS26 accessibility issues with Spoken Content/Speak Screen and Voice Over.

On my iphone 14 pro I upgraded to iOS26 and the upgrade went smoothly. Every day I use Accessibility > Spoken Content > Speak Screen + Speech Controller to read ebooks and such aloud (e.g. in kindle app). Normally, after double-tapping the hand icon (one finger that points up) then pressing play, it reads aloud + turns pages seamlessly across chapters as long as I don't change apps or lock my phone (which has worked for years). 

After ios26 update the speech controller has significantly changed, I was hoping for multi tasking support but instead the pointing up finger icon isn't there, now there is a speak on touch icon (not the same function won't turn pages when reading etc), the controller bar only collapses about 10% of the time, and the rest it gets stuck on right in the middle of the screen, becomes unresponsive and will only read things from apps where the old 'safari reader function' would have worked, i.e. safari and chrome not apps like kindle. When you have kindle app in the foreground it doesn't give you the usual 'no speakable content found on the screen' speech, just does nothing when you press play then immediately bugs out and the controller bar freezes and sticks as expanded. I fiddled with settings in the new Read & Speak area, and also tried toggling the new Accessibility Reader on and off but nothing made it work.

I have dyslexia and use these tools daily for a lot of things, not just kindle book reading but it's a good example of what's happening. I then attempted to use Voice Over to do it, even though the gestures are a language of their own and while customisable, aren't able to be fully set to anything intuitive, I have a hard time remembering them and there are issues if the phone rings while in this mode. But I was desperate and didn't want to wait for a fix from Apple so I set/customised a few gestures and turned it on, but there were bugs there too, it reads 1-3 words then starts continuously jumping back and forward pages, after multiple attempts, phone restarts and change of settings at most it read half a page then stopped and when I swiped to read all content again it began jumping back and forward pages rapidly again.

At this point I was invested and keen to find a solution, so I even tried turning all the apple functions off and engaging Kindle’s assistive reader... buuuut that had bugs too - it reads a small portion of text then just stops, when you press play again hangs then quits the app entirely. Restart of app and phone doesn't work.

Using Kindle assistive reader wasn't my ideal solution as Kindle won’t allow you to chose a voice and uses non-premium voices that have no tone, verbosity or pitch changes and sound like a monotone robot that’s borderline unable to be understood. I’m in Australia and usually use Jamie premium voice (uk voice) for accessibility Speak Screen, which has excellent tone/pitch/verbosity, pauses where it needs to after full stops and so on, it's as close to real as you can get and I've spent years adding to the pronunciations etc. So I really want a solution but right now even the default kindle voice would be a temporary solution that would get me though if I could get it to work, but I'm at a loss for solutions now.

I even tried changing my default language to English UK but that caused Kindle to read with David's voice, again not the premium voice and still kept quitting and freezing. I went back to Aus language on reverting the voice settings to Jamie premium, I thought I'd install some extra voices which is always a bit slow but now they start downloading and get stuck (for hours) and never finish, even if you exit and properly close settings then re-open it, they are still loading. Internet isn't an issue.

I upgraded my macbook pro m4 to tahoe as well and even tried using voice over to read via the kindle app on that but it won't recognise the text on screen and just reads the menu instead of the page on the laptop.

Can anyone suggest another solution or alternative I haven't found? I've reported to apple.