If you use a screen magnifier you can use a mouse to click on the links in the Table of Contents and move to a desired section. Table of ContentsĬhoose the Table of Contents from the Go To menu to hear the Table of Contents read aloud. Using the arrow keys, select the instance you want and choose "Enter." You will be taken to the top of the page and will, unfortunately, have to read to find the actual term.
Though the edit field where you enter the search term does not allow you to fix mistakes, the tool does return an accessible list of results. The search tool works with screen readers and magnifiers to search for particular words or phrases within a book. If you have a Kindle device, this is where you will find books you have purchased on that device if you open one of the books in the list, you will be taken to the same location where you left off reading on the device.
The "Archive" button allows you to access books you have purchased but not yet downloaded. The right and left arrows scroll through the list choose "Enter" to open a selected book. If you tab to the "Home" element, you have arrived at your book list. Accessibility of Selected Featuresīelow is a discussion of the accessibility of selected features of the Kindle for PC-Accessibility application. Therefore, I will be referring to JAWS and NVDA when discussing screen reader functionality in the remainder of this article. Window-Eyes would not speak as you tab through the various controls of the main interface, so it could not access the bulk of the application's functionality. There is also an accessible menu system for other items, and it also features several shortcut keys. The interface functions much like a standard dialog box, as you use the Tab key to move between the various controls. We tested the interface with JAWS 12, Window-Eyes 7.5, NVDA, and ZoomText, and most of the interface elements were accessible using each of these tools, except for Window-Eyes.
Another issue is that the software does not recognize or report the graphics included in a book. Also, if you move to the previous or next sentence to read it, the reader automatically continues reading the rest of the page, instead of stopping after reading the target sentence. Although there is a keystroke command for sentence-by-sentence navigation, the software does not allow you to move from page to page this way you must always manually turn the page.
With Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin, it's not possible to navigate by paragraph, word, or character, which makes it impossible to check the spelling of a word. What many may find to be an even bigger problem is the lack of functional navigation. Comparing the three tools (the built-in TTS on the Kindle device, Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin on a computer, and the VictorReader Stream DAISY MP3 player) reading the exact same book, we found that Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin frequently had trouble pausing appropriately at ends of sentences, especially when the sentence contained quotation marks, question marks, or abbreviations. However, the synthesizer doesn't perform quite as well as it does on the VictorReader Stream player, or even as well as it does on the actual Kindle device. These voices will be familiar to users of the VictorReader Stream DAISY MP3 player from Humanware. For reading the actual content of books the application uses the Vocalizer speech synthesizer from Nuance, which features the Samantha and Tom voices. You use your own screen reader such as JAWS or NVDA to access the interface for the software. The software facilitates screen reader access to all Kindle books, even if an author or publisher has not granted text-to-speech (TTS) functionality.
How It WorksĪvailable for free download online through Amazon, Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin is certainly an improvement over the earlier versions of Kindle for PC. However, in early 2011, Amazon released the Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin, and this article will evaluate the accessibility provided by this software. In addition, Kindle for PC, the application you can use to read Kindle books on a computer, was not designed to be compatible with screen readers or screen magnifiers. Although my last review reported that the accessibility of this very popular reading device has improved incrementally with each new version, the Kindle is still not something I would recommend for people with vision loss. Regular readers of AccessWorld may have noticed that I have written several less-than-favorable evaluations of the Kindle e-book reader device from Amazon.