TalkBack vs TalkBack: reading large bodies of text

I've been using Android for over 10 years, so I can trace the development of accessibility from versions like 2.3 to Android 16. The main issue with the large blocks of text you mentioned is not so much their size, but that these blocks are usually part of some kind of web content (not necessarily in the browser, but perhaps some application displays some content like a web page). At the same time, the user experience with Android Screenreader is fundamentally different, depending on whether the user interacts with the native interface or with web content. On iOS, I can understand that the application uses a web-view to display the interface only by the presence of new items in the VoiceOver rotor, but otherwise the experience of use is practically the same. Whereas on Android Talkback instantly becomes much less responsive, focus may begin to spontaneously jump between elements, and behavior is often observed when swiping to the left, instead of returning focus to the previous element, may move it, say, to the very beginning of the current window, i.e. not even to the first element displayed on the screen, but to what would be the first element if you scrolled to the very top.
Speaking of large articles and the like, on iOS I often read books directly in the browser, i.e. I open a site that shows the entire book as one huge html, then you can find the chapter you need by simply moving through the headings, or, in case of poor layout, using the scroll bar on the right of the page - and VoiceOver continues to be responsive, even on huge pages. On Android, however, firstly, Talkback becomes very slow when trying to navigate through such large pages, which means that some of the gestures for moving, say, between headings, may simply be ignored, or Screenreader will try to do them all, but after I do something else, and secondly, the lack of a scroll bar makes it very difficult to navigate through really huge pages, because... Normal scrolling can behave unpredictably.
To clarify, I currently use an iPhone 16 with iOS 26.3 as my main device, in addition to which I have a Galaxy S25 on Android 16 and One UI 8.0, and both the native Talkback and the Google version are installed as a Screenreader on Samsung. eSpeak NG is used as TTS on both devices; in the case of iOS this has virtually no effect, but on Android this TTS has almost the fastest response time. Finally, in the Google Talkback settings, I tried reducing all types of delay, turning off multi-finger gesture processing, and all the other tips that you can find on the Internet to reduce lag when using Talkback.
In fact, I really like Android for its openness, significantly fewer restrictions and greater customization options. This is why I didn’t use iOS at all for a long time, then, after literally several years with the iPhone SE (first generation), I returned to Android immediately, as it turned out that the next iOS update practically eliminated the possibility of its Jailbreak. But a long period of time with Android as my primary device has shown that even though Google is gradually adding many of VoiceOver's features to Talkback, such as Brail Screen Input, Spell Checking, and Reading Controls, the overall user experience still leaves much to be desired.
For example, the recently presented image descriptions seem fantastic, and I am very sorry that Apple does not have an analogue for VoiceOver (it is not clear why there was so much talk about powerful neural processors in the latest iPhone models, if there are practically no real user scenarios where their potential would be used), but at the same time, in the vast majority of tasks, the iPhone simply allows me to do significantly more and more efficiently than Android in the same scenario.

Reading this, and thank you for such a detail answer, I can confidently say that I'd almost never switch to android, as reading large body of text is one of the main things I do on my iphone.
This really reminds me of the accessibility dynamic of macos where most problems seem to be on the web and or editing text. Usable but UX could be better. Anyways.

I'm not sure I can claim to be subjective, but macOS gave me similar impressions. I've been using Windows for over 15 years, almost all this time with NVDA as my main Screenreader. This platform allows me to easily coding using complex IDEs or simple text editors, read and write mathematical content in LaTeX, use a GUI or terminal (both Windows and WSL), and, finally, websites of any complexity, including those with a lot of dynamically executed JS and complex web content, including for navigation using ScreenReader.
I recently had the opportunity to try out the macBook Air (M2) for about a week. I understand that this is definitely not enough time to learn any subtle system features or accessibility tricks, and also that macOS requires a fundamentally different model for using ScreenReader. However, the overall impression was extremely negative. Of course, basic tasks like writing simple text notes, surfing trivial web pages, or chatting in instant messengers can be performed with almost the same efficiency as in Windows. However, when it comes to something more complex: I tried installing XCode and CLion - VoiceOver works very inconsistently, especially when a large file is open (more than 10,000 lines of code); I tried to create an office document with a complex structure (tables, images, formulas) - either it was due to unusual patterns of interaction with the office suite, or object navigation simply did not allow you to navigate through the document structure as quickly as with the presentation model used in Windows; I tried using the terminal - VoiceOver is very slow if any command generates huge output (multiple screens), the only thing that helps is a complete restart of the terminal application, and it’s quite easy to accidentally forget to redirect the output to something like less. Finally, web surfing was a separate pain: Safari constantly does not respond, especially on even slightly large pages, for example, I cannot review code on Github if it is a large file; Due to the lack of an analogue of Page Up and Page Down to move a given number of lines down/up, it becomes almost impossible to interact with sites that have poor HTML markup, i.e. one where, for example, there are practically no headings; Overall, VoiceOver's responsiveness drops significantly when running in a browser (I tried Safari and Microsoft Edge); and finally, Google apps for editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations never worked for me - I tried changing browsers, reloading the page, repeatedly turning on/off accessibility support - VoiceOver simply does not focuses on the contents of the document. It was especially ironic when one of the applications I needed crashed with an error, I wanted to look at the logs, but VoiceOver worked very poorly when opening a huge text file, then I got the idea to paste their contents into a Pastebin and retype this link on a Windows device (messengers were not yet installed on macOS at that time) - but Safari froze every time I tried to paste the contents of the log file into a text field on a web page.
I understand that for many of the things described, most likely, there are workarounds, some of which I may not have initially done in the most optimal way. However, the original purpose of this post is not to show that on macOS nothing can be done with VoiceOver, but to show examples of use cases that I first encountered on Windows, I did not put any additional effort into doing the same things with Screenreader, but simply began to solve the original problem.

Honestly, TalkBack doesn’t handle large blocks of text very well. I’m not sure about the technical reasons, but like someone explained above, it can be pretty annoying. VoiceOver is much better in that regard, whether you’re browsing, selecting large chunks of text, or editing. I avoid doing that as much as possible with TalkBack because it’s a clumsy, slow, and frustrating experience.

It's good to have more then one screenreader, I found that jieshuo does a really good job at reading long articals