I’m sorry about your VoiceView difficulties, Drew. Let’s hope Amazon will improve the interface. It would also be wonderful if the company once again let sighted people use TTS easily. With AI, TTS can be amazingly good. It should be available on all E Ink devices, not just the Fire.

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Hi Mark. I am sorry to read of the problems your wife has been experiencing with the text to speech facility on the Kindle. I am registered blind, I can see outlines but possess no useful vision in terms of reading screens including the one on Kindles. I appreciate that you and your wife don’t have much experience with smart phones. However, if you do decide to use an iPhone the Kindle app on Apple devices is, in my experience very accessible. In fact I don’t use my Kindle device any more, I prefer the app on my phone. I hope you find a workable solution. Best wishes. Kevin

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Best wishes – Kevin

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I understand from friends that the touch screen action on a zKindle is vastly different than on an iDevice. I know from personal exploration that there are bits at the very bottom of the screen that I can only access by using the very edge of a fingernail, the stuff that says the location you are in a book, and I think there are other bits such as how much you have read in a chapter. It’s so mysterious, I really don’t understand it well. I worked through the voice tutorial too, and it helped just a bit.

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I can’t say if I’ll review anything else. I much appreciate your inquiry though. I’m not techy enough to really enjoy reviewing and have had some computer troubles of late with my text-to-speech screen reader. It can be tricky when using several bits of adaptive tech, a screen reader and, say, a Braille display, because you can risk being told by the Braille display people that the problem is with the speech component, and vice versa. Perhaps, I may review something later. But I tend to jinx my adaptive tech and just feel rather fossiliferous.

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That said, my first thought on reading about David F’s trials with Kindle accessibility was that a large part of his difficulty stems from his not having any experience with touch screens. Many younger assistive tech users have iPhones, iPads, or Androids–all touch-screen devices–so their first encounter with the Kindle would be less overwhelming and chaotic Than David’s. I’m not diminishing his experience. Library patrons who are relatively new to blindness may also be inexperienced with the touch-screenTTS combo. I’m simply pointing out that David was dealing with two learning curves, one for the Kindle and another for the touch screen, like being asked to evaluate an electronic form without knowing how to use a qwertty keyboard.

If ereaders are being implemented in libraries, I think Amazon can make braille and large print command lists available on request, and I think librarians should be trained to use the ereader’s accessibility features (without looking at the screen, of course) so they can train patrons in the basics. These seem to me to be two relatively simple and low-cost ways of opening libraries up to people who are blind and visually impaired.

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