Kobo Aura HD eReader for low vision users – video transcript
Title:
This is a short video of some the features of the Kobo Aura HD eBook reader that might be useful to a reader with low vision
Narrator:
The Aura doesn’t have any text-to-speech in it so you do have to be able to see the screen in order to be able to use it, but there are some ways in which you can adjust the way that screens look which might be useful to you.
The first is that the front screen of the Aura, when you first turn it on, shows a number of different things that you can look at, such as your library and then some awards and things like this, but if you’re really interested in reading a book you can touch the Library button and then touch Books and you get a much cleaner list of the books that are available to you on the device.
If we choose one of these and go in to read it, again the way that the text comes up can be altered. We can’t change the orientation of the device but by tapping the middle of the screen a menu appears and at the bottom I can tap the AA button and this brings up a menu of features that are available to me in terms of the way that the font looks.
One of the things I can do is change the font face - that’s the actual shape of the text. The document default will depend on the way that the publisher set it. There are a number of serif and sans serif fonts, notably the font at the bottom of the list, OpenDyslexic, has been designed specifically for dyslexic readers. I have a particular preference for Gill or “Jill” Sans, I’m not sure which way it’s pronounced, some I’m going to set it to that.
I can also do things like change the font size. I can either tap the “+” and the “-“ at the edge of the slider showing the font size, or I can just grab the font size button and move it, and you can probably see the size of the text behind the menus is changing already.
I can also make changes to the line spacing and the margins in the same way, and – uniquely, I think, for an eBook reader - I can choose whether I have justification set to “full justification”, “left justification” or “off”, which just means leaving it as it is in the way that the publisher has decided.
Another feature of the Aura - which is only available on the Aura – is that once you’ve chosen your font face and size, I can also choose to change the weight of the font, in other words the boldness of the font, and this might be particularly useful for some people. And I can also change the sharpness of the font, and again, it may just be useful for you to play around with the settings in order to see whether you prefer them. There are two versions, the before and after version, underneath this and then two buttons underneath allow me to choose whether to revert to the settings before I came into this Advanced font settings area, or to apply them. I’m going to choose to apply them.
Another setting that might be useful to know about, on the aura, is the glow light. The glow lights can be switched on with the button at the top of the device. Once it’s on, I can change its settings, in terms of the level of the brightness, from a very low level to quite a high level. This has the effect of changing the contrast between the foreground and background as well as applying a light which means I could now use the device when I didn’t have a lamp or the sun or something available to me.
I hope you found this very short video of some of the features of the Kobo Aura HD useful.
End:
This video showed the Kobo Aura HD with software version 2.6.1
Logo:
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