e-Taalim

From the Editor: The following article was researched and written by Amy Mason, a relatively new member of the Access Technology Team that among other responsibilities staffs the International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind. Amy was a longtime member of the National Federation of the Blind of Nebraska. She has held several elected positions in the affiliate and now contributes her many talents to advance technology for the blind. The topic of accessible e-books is of interest to all who love to read—the ability to get at books without the need for a third party to intervene in order to make them accessible. To get the same books at the same time at the same price is our goal, but this list is incomplete if we don’t add to it the demand that we receive the same quality in presentation that our sighted friends and neighbors enjoy. Amy treats us to a first-class, hard-hitting evaluation of e-book readers. Here is what she says:
E-books are an extremely popular topic these days. Ever since Amazon introduced the Kindle and built the first really successful mainstream e-book reader, more and more people are talking about, buying, and using e-books in several formats on a number of competing platforms at varying prices for many reasons: leisure, education, reference, and work. E-books are an especially exciting development for print-disabled and blind readers because their properties make them ideal for finding alternative forms of access. When an e-book is presented in an accessible format on an accessible e-book reader, the user can choose to read the book using text-to-speech, Braille, or magnification. Furthermore, accessible e-books in an open market benefit everyone. Publishers gain access to an otherwise untapped revenue stream, those who cannot access traditional print materials. The general public gains access to books that are even more flexible and feature-rich than they are now, while blind and other print-disabled users, for the first time in history, gain access to the same books and publications at the same price and at the same time as the rest of society.

Unfortunately, the landscape of e-book reading technology is littered with hundreds of combinations of file formats, devices, and platforms. These competing platforms and devices include varying levels of accessibility and different methods of access. To add to the confusion, some sites for purchasing e-books are less than forthcoming in mentioning features that might affect a book’s accessibility, so it is difficult to find the best solution.

In this article we will look at several of the major e-book-reading platforms, their accessibility features, major drawbacks, and other pertinent information, so that users can make informed choices about what platforms and file types are likely to be of most use to them.

Because of the complexity of the current e-book-reading landscape, this article will focus on dedicated hardware devices: Apple iOS software, Mac, and Windows PC support. None of the tested e-book readers on the Android platform at the time of testing were accessible, Windows Phone 7 doesn’t contain support for access technology at this time, and Symbian phones are becoming difficult to purchase since they are no longer being manufactured; so these platforms are ill suited to comparison in this article.

Blio

Blio is a fairly new e-book technology. It was created by KNFB Reading Technologies to provide e-books that are visually appealing; laid out like their print counterparts; and, most excitingly, accessible to screen-access technology. The Blio platform has the backing of Baker and Taylor, one of the largest e-book publishers in the market, and it already has a large collection of materials in many areas of interest. Furthermore, on small-screen iOS devices the VoiceOver experience is fairly pleasant. It is possible to read by line, by word, or by character; to jump to different chapters and pages; and to read both continuously and page by page. Finally, the Blio iOS e-book reader allows reading with a Bluetooth Braille display.

Unfortunately, this is where the joys of using Blio end. While well intentioned and technologically impressive, Blio seems to have gotten so wrapped up in the final product and its visual presentation that many accessibility details have been overlooked or poorly implemented. For instance, for the PC, Blio’s website mentions the system requirements for running the program (Windows XP SP3 or newer and JAWS versions 11 or newer). They do not mention that running Blio with JAWS requires Windows 7. Next, once it is up and running on Windows, it works well until the user has a reason to tab away from its window, the computer goes to standby, or the program loses focus for any reason. After any of these common events, it is no longer possible to read the text by any element larger than word by word, because, if the user attempts to, the program skips about half of the words on the page. The only fix we found in testing the program was to reset the computer, since restarting JAWS and Blio is not enough to cause the program to act correctly. Furthermore, changing the book view has been known to cause the program to crash. Last of all, there appears to be a bug in the iPad version of the software which causes it to try to read an entire page of text when the user attempts to read by line. Thus, although Blio has a good start, its producer still has a fair distance to go before the product is a truly trustworthy solution. Suite…
Source: nfb.org