2013Kindle Fire HD with low vision
Narrator:
Welcome to our next video in our short series about the accessibility features of the new Kindle Fire HD.
In the previous video we showed you how you can turn on the magnification facility of the Kindle Fire, so that by tapping three times with one finger, everything on the screen becomes magnified.
We'll now show you how you can use that to help you read your eBooks.
The first thing I might want to do is open my books app which is where all my books are kept - the first time this happens you go through a short tutorial where you have to tap the screen and try some gestures out - and the magnification once again goes off. I reintroduce that and I'm going to pick a book which is already on my device - it's got a little tick at the bottom right hand corner. All the other books, which don't have a tick at the bottom right hand corner would need to be downloaded before I could open them.
So, once I've gone into my book, I could turn magnification on and try and read it like that, but of course I would then have to scroll around with two fingers and that would be very tiring and very difficult to actually read a book in that way.
But, what I can do is go to the top left of the screen where there is an Aa menu, and this has various options that allow me to change the size and colour of the text.
Of the two buttons nearest the top, the larger Aa button allows me to make the text larger, and if I just move the menu so that you can see the text of the book behind it, you might be able to see it's getting larger each time I touch that Aa. In fact now it's got so large i might be able to turn off my magnification and still read it comfortably.
The text can be made larger still - that's at its largest size, when you don't get a great deal of text on a page and indeed some longer words you may find will break because they're too long to fit on the screen in portrait mode. You can of course put the device into landscape mode and get a smaller number of lines with more text on each one.
If I go back into the options menu, we can also do things like change the size of the margins. By making the margins smaller, that can actually help with the break-up of words that I just showed you.
We can also choose to increase or decrease the line spacing and that can have an effect for some people, and I can also change the background colour of the screen. I can either change it to a sepia colour so that it's just less glary, and it is also possible to reverse the colours of the text.
If you have a particular preference for a certain font type, there is a choice of a number of different fonts available. I quite like the Georgia that's there already.
Another option is to turn on text-to-speech to read my book. If I'm going to do that, I don't need the text as large because I'm not going to be looking at it on the screen, I'm going to be listening to it. If I turn on the text-to-speech, when I come back to my book and tap the middle of the screen, to get the menus, there is a new option at the bottom left which is a Play button.
Text-to-speech:
As I watched them go. I hope they're all right I thought as they disappearedaround the corner out of ...
Narrator:
The only variation I can make to the voice is the rate at which it's speaking, and I can tap a little icon at the bottom right hand corner of the screen to change the speed of the voice. I'm just going to show it to you at times two.
Text-to-speech:
I hope they're all right I thought as they disappeared around the corner out of sight.
Narrator:
Most people might prefer it at the standard times one!
Text-to-speech:
I hope they're all right I thought as they disappeared
Narrator:
The text-to-speech can be a useful addition to increasing the size of text. It is notable, however, that that text-to-speech may not work with all books that are bought from the Kindle store. Most of them do have text-to-speech enabled, but it is possible to come across books for which that text-to-speech will not work.
For those people who require speech for all books, and indeed, can't see well enough to use the menus that are on the Kindle Fire, the next video will demonstrate the screen reader facility of the Kindle Fire HD.
Thank you.
This video demonstrated the new 2013 Kindle Fire HD running system version11.3.0.3.
Logo:
RNIB supporting blind and partially sighted people.
rnib.org.uk