Posting here with my apologies to anyone subscribed to AppleVis who might wind up seeing this twice.

I wanted to ask for thoughts on the state of reading subtitles aloud on iOS, but really I'd take any platform.

My understanding is that Netflix and iTunes can read subtitles aloud with Voiceover, so if the media you're looking for is on one of those platforms you're doing all right. However, I've been wanting to watch One Punch Man's season 2, and it's not available on those platforms, and I don't believe they've created a dubbed version.

I've...acquired...a version of the season in MKV with embedded English subtitles, and also found an external subtitle file that I can load. However, the way that's recommended online to read subtitles aloud in iOS, nplayer, no longer seems to function, apparently after an update. Seems like a good and mostly pretty accessible app, but the functionality for reading subtitles with VO just doesn't work, as far as I can tell. I've activated the subtitles with voiceover toggle both in and out of the video and also tried loading the external subtitle file, with no luck.

Just for completeness, I'll also describe the other routes I've gone trying to watch this season.

I used KMplayer to watch season 1 using embedded subtitles. However, later versions of KMplayer have a bug where the subtitle voice output repeats until the next trigger, which is really impossible to listen to. If I roll back to the earlier version of KMplayer (3.7), the video doesn't work, because the version of season 2 I have needs newer codecs or something.

VLC has a plugin that someone wrote to read subtitles aloud and which was incorporated into the main VLC application. This would be great if it worked, but it does not seem to function. It seems that this feature only works with externally loaded subtitle files, and I did try loading a file, but I still get no voice output. Tried this in both Windows and Linux.

I'm a programmer, and willing to put in the time and energy to get this working, and still I've come up mostly dry here. Wanted to know if the community had any thoughts. I'm also well resourced, I have Windows, Mac OS, and Linux devices, plus iOS and Android, and can afford to buy or subscribe to things. I'll really take any suggestions here.

I'm going to link below to other pages on reading subtitles aloud, if for no other reason than I might find them useful if I'm tempted to go down this rabbithole again in the future.

nplayer for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nplayer-plus/id539397400
KMplayer for Windows: Not linking to a download as this utility is borderline malware. 3.7 is the version that works, 3.8 and later is bugged.
Discussion of this problem on Nextup: https://nextup.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3142
Discussion of adding the TTS plugin to VLC: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=145522
Low vision guy who created a video on this issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_D69vjtCgg