Episode 18 — The small print: when you simply can't read the leaflet

Iza’s mum is sitting in the kitchen under the lamp. A magnifying glass, a second pair of glasses on over the first, a leaflet folded up like a concertina. After a moment she puts the paper down and says: right, I’ll take it the way I always have. This isn’t a story about her not understanding something. It’s a story about her physically not being able to see it. A barrier of eyesight, not a barrier of knowledge — and that’s a completely different problem, with completely different answers.

This episode is about four routes to the same content when the print is too small: a magnifier, the file from an official register, the phone’s built-in screen reading, and the pharmacist. We’re straight about each one, including where it runs out.

The most important caveat, right at the top: mojApteczka does NOT read the patient leaflet aloud. The leaflet it only opens, as a link to the official register. What it reads aloud is the Summary of Product Characteristics — a different, official document about the same medicine, written for doctors and pharmacists, not for the patient. That’s a harder text, and we don’t pretend that hearing it read out makes it any simpler. We say so plainly in the episode, because keeping quiet about it would be dishonest.

What we talk about:

• A phone reads text, not paper. Which is why “take a photo of the leaflet, the phone will read it” usually fails. Newer phones do recognise text in a photo — good enough for a receipt. Across three pages of dense print in two columns, the recognition loses chunks and glues the columns together.
• The same leaflet as a file. The leaflet is also published as a document you can download. Same content, different medium: a file you can enlarge without it going blurry, and if there’s real text inside it, the phone can read it aloud. How to tell text from a scan — a simple search test.
• The TalkBack trap. It isn’t “reading text out”, it’s a full screen reader for people who can’t see the screen at all. Switch it on and the whole way you use the phone changes. If you can see the print and it’s simply too small, you’re looking for something else.
• The pharmacist. The only route where somebody will not just read it, but EXPLAIN it. No app does that.
• What the app does. On the medicine’s documentation screen there’s a speaker button: the phone reads the name of the medicine and then the sections of the Summary — there are nine. The voice comes from the speech engine in the phone, nothing goes off to the network; the documentation has to sync once. A section can be translated on the device (English, Ukrainian, Russian), and the voice switches to the language you can see on the screen. It works on the free plan.

What the app does NOT do: it doesn’t read the patient leaflet, it doesn’t summarise or simplify (it reads the official text word for word), it doesn’t advise, it won’t judge whether a medicine is right for you, and it won’t pick a dose. That’s what your GP and your pharmacist are for. We’re also open in the episode about what we haven’t tested: the whole path with a blind user.

Materials:

• The mojApteczka app: mojapteczka.pl — free, works offline (after a first sync)
• In this episode: reading the medicine documentation aloud, the nine sections of the Summary of Product Characteristics, translating a section on the device, the phone’s accessibility settings
• Contact: kontakt@mojapteczka.pl

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About AI in this episode. The dialogue was written by Tomasz Szuster. The voices you hear are AI-generated synthetic voices — not recordings of the hosts. We say this straight out, because we think it should be the standard for any podcast made this way. Full details in the show notes and in the episode outro.