Making the Most of Adobe Digital Editions 2
Making the most of Adobe Digital Editions: a guide for blind and partially sighted people
In order to read an eBook, you need either an eBook device or an eBook app on a computer, tablet or mobile phone. Adobe Digital Editions is a free eBook app for Windows and Mac computers. Like other eBook reading devices and apps, it allows you to change the size of text within a book. Unlike other eBook apps, it has full keyboard accessibility and allows you to use your preferred computer's screen colours, or the latest version of most screen readers, to read an eBook.
1. Getting Adobe Digital Editions
Adobe Digital Editions version 2 was released in September 2012, and includes a large number of accessibility improvements. You can download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/digital-editions.html
The page contains additional information and some free books you can download, which might be useful if you want to test this method of reading.
2. Setting up Adobe Digital Editions
The install process only takes a few seconds. You can start reading unprotected books straight away. You will be asked to "authorise" your computer before you can read any protected books. See the Appendix if you are not sure what a protected book is.
The authorisation process is started automatically if you try to open a protected eBook, or you can start it from the Help menu. You will have three choices:
1. If you have an Adobe ID, you can use it to authorise the computer;
2. If you don’t have an Adobe ID you can use the "Create an Adobe ID" link to go to the website and fill in a form. Once your ID has been created, return to this screen and enter the relevant details.
3. You can choose to authorise without an Adobe ID.
The benefit to using an Adobe ID is that you can authorise up to six devices with the same Adobe ID and then transfer books between and read them on all these devices. If you don't use an Adobe ID you can still open protected books on this computer, but you cannot read them on another device.
2.1 Screen reader issues with authorising
The authorisation screen can present problems to some screen readers.
· NVDA does not read the Password edit, which follows immediately after the Username edit.
· Supernova 12.07 does not read this window at all well.
There are two possible issues with the online form you have to complete to create an Adobe Account:
· Only some fields are required, and these are marked with a red asterisk that may not be vocalised.
· Some fields also have additional info, e.g. password must be between 6 and 12 characters, which may not be read.
To solve these issues, use the virtual mode of your screen reader and make sure punctuation is vocalised.
3. Ready to read: using Digital Editions
Digital Editions has two screens that you will need to be familiar with:
· The Library screen shows the books that are available to read and has some controls to change which books are shown and how they are displayed.
· The Reading screen shows the content of one book so that you can read it. There are controls to navigate the book and change how it looks.
There are some additional facilities, such as searching and bookmarking, that you may also want to use.
There is a menubar on screen at all times. The items on the menubar change according to the situation you are in.
There are three ways you can use most features:
1. An item in a menu
2. A keyboard shortcut
3. A control on the screen
When Digital Editions opens for the first time, you have one book in your library. This is the Digital Editions manual, and it contains some useful information about accessibility, including lists of keystrokes. It only mentions the three screen readers Adobe have tested - JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver.
3.1 The Library screen
The main area of the library screen shows the books on your computer.
For each book, you should hear at least the title and author. The number of the last page read, the total number of pages in the book, and the date it was added to your computer are also on screen, but your screen reader may not read this.
You can go to the File menu and choose Item Info to get more information on the title.
You can use the other controls on the Library screen, or the menus, to change how your books are displayed on the screen.
With focus on the book you want to read, press Space to open it. When you open a book, the screen changes to show the Reading screen, with focus on the book contents.
3.2 The Reading screen
The main area of the reading screen shows the content of a book. Depending on the size of the text, one, two or three columns may be visible. Below the book content are controls to change page, and above it are other controls for returning to the library, adding a bookmark, turning on and off the navigation panel, changing the font and searching the book.
· With latest versions of JAWS and Window-Eyes, the "read to end" keystroke will automatically turn pages and read to the end of a book unless you stop it first.
· For other screen readers, the "read to end" keystroke will only read what is on the current screen. Press PageDown and PageUp to change pages (or, on a Mac, RightArrow and LeftArrow).
· One way to increase the amount of text on the current screen is to maximise the programme window and choose the smallest font size.
· The first page of a book may be read as "blank". This is because it contains a graphic of the book cover, which a screen reader can't read. Also, the next few pages of a book often contain copyright and publisher information which reads badly because it doesn't use punctuation - don't be put off by this! Once you get to the text, things look up.
· If dialogue is hard to follow, remember you can tweak your screen reader settings to vocalise quote marks, which might make it easier.
· Close a book and return to the Library screen by clicking the Library button near the top left corner of the Reading screen (screen reader label is "back to Library button"). On a Windows computer, you can also open the File menu and choose Close, or use the shortcut Ctrl-W, to return to the Library screen.
Windows computers only:
· DownArrow reads the next sentence, and UpArrow goes to the previous sentence.
· With most screen readers you can read by character or word, using the usual keystrokes. Reading by paragraph isn't possible.
· Reading by letter includes accents, for instance umlauts.
· Links are announced as you read the book. Press Ctrl-F7 to get a list of links on the current screen, arrow to the one you want and press Enter.
· The "Go to Page" edit has a shortcut of Ctrl-Shift-P. There is no direct way to check how many pages there are in a book, but you can press Ctrl-End to jump to the end of a book and then use the Go to Page edit to see what page number you are on. Check which page number you're on first so that you can easily return to it!
Problems for Windows computers:
· Reading by sentence continues over the end of one paragraph of dialogue and into the next.
· Punctuation is rarely used in headings, so a heading and the first sentence of the following paragraph may be read as one sentence.
· The keystroke Ctrl-PageDown used when reading a book crashes JAWS, so beware!
Mac computers only:
· Navigation is limited to reading by page. You can press Ctrl to pause and restart the speech, but you cannot review a book's content or read by character, word, sentence or paragraph.
· The "Go to Page" edit has a shortcut of Cmd-Shift-P. This screen also shows the total number of pages in a book.
· Links are not announced as you read a book, and so are difficult to use.
3.3 Bookmarks
· A navigation panel can be made to appear to the left of the document. It can show a table of contents, or a list of bookmarks. Both of these can be useful ways to navigate a document.
· While a table of contents can only be created by the author of a document, as the reader you can create as many bookmarks as you like. More information on tables of contents is given below.
· When you create a bookmark, it is given a title based on the current time and date; you can change this to a more meaningful label by selecting the bookmark name in the navigation panel and then using the Options button just above the list of bookmarks.
· Bookmarks are linked to the start of currently visible screen, rather than a specific word or area, so odd things can happen if you change the font size between creating a bookmark and using it.
3.4 Searching
· You can use the Search edit or open the Reading menu and choose Find to start a search. Type in a word or phrase and press Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac) to do the search.
· Searches look forward from the current book location.
· If the word you search for isn't in the book, the words "no match found" will appear just under the search area and a screen reader should read this or say "unknown" or "custom".
· If the word you search for is in the book, the next instance of the word will be highlighted. If your screen reader doesn't automatically read out the text around the highlighted word, press UpArrow and then DownArrow to hear the sentence containing the search item. On a Mac, the whole screen will be read out. If this doesn’t happen, press RightArrow to move to the next page and then LeftArrow to return to the current page.
· Once you've typed something to search for, Find Previous and Find Next buttons appear just after the search edit. Use these or open the Reading menu and choose Find to choose whether to move forward or back through the book.
3.5 Annotating
Annotating text can only be done with the mouse - select an area of text, then right click and choose Highlight to get a window into which you can type your annotation. When finished, click the minus button at the top left of the window; the text will remain highlighted in yellow to indicate the presence of the annotation. You can also use the Bookmarks notification panel to get to it.
3.6 Tables of contents
Some documents may contain a table of contents, which is a list of links to various parts of the document. This can be show in the navigation panel, which is opened from the Reading menu and appears before the book content.
If the table of contents is a hierarchy of different levels - in other words there are major headings that contain sub-headings - this is made apparent in different ways.
· Windows - the table of contents is a tree view. Changes of level aren't announced by a screen reader
· Mac - a heading which has sub-headings has the words "edit text" added to it by VoiceOver.
Press Space on a heading to move to that page of the book, and close the Table of Contents. Focus goes to the top of the page containing the heading, rather than to the heading itself.
4. Adapting screen colours and text size
Digital Editions honours settings you make in Mac OS X and Windows Vista and upwards, but not on Windows XP. This means that if you change your screen colours or font size, the new settings will take effect inside Digital Editions.
It's possible to change the size of text used just for book contents. While on the Reading screen:
· Use the shortcuts Ctrl-Equals and Ctrl-Minus (Cmd-Equals and Cmd-Minus on the Mac), or
· Open the Reading menu and then the PDF View or EPUB Text Size submenu, depending on which type of book you have open
· Click the button to the left of the Search area at the top right of the Reading screen and choose one of the options from the list presented. For EPUB documents, this button will be marked AA and given by a screen reader as Text Size. For PDFs, the button has the icon on a page with a down arrow next to it, and is given by a screen reader as PDF View options.
The specific text size options available depend on whether you have an EPUB or a PDF document open.
· For an EPUB document, text size can be Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large or Ultra Large. Whatever size of text you choose, the text will wrap within the width of the programme window. At smaller text sizes, the text may split into two or three columns.
· For a PDF document, the options are Fit Page, Fit Width, Actual Size (1:1), Zoom 1.5x, Zoom 2x and Zoom 4x. At any size beyond that used for Fit Width, the text may extend beyond the left or right edges of the screen, in which case the scroll bar beneath the document can be used to reach this text.
If the Digital Editions window does not take up all the space on the screen, click the middle of the three buttons at the top right of the Digital Editions window to maximise it. With the keyboard, you can press Alt-X to open the system menu and choose Maximise from the menu that appears. With Windows 7, you can also use the shortcut Windows-UpArrow.
If you want larger magnification than that offered by the options in the Reading menu, you can use a screen magnifier. With magnification up to x2.5, it is possible to resize the Digital Editions window so that the text of a book fits on the magnified screen without having to scroll around.
On Mac OS X Lion and above, the Zoom feature (the green button at the top left of the Digital Editions window, or on the Window menu) can be used to maximise the Digital Editions window so that it takes up all the space between the menu bar and the Dock. Also, while the mouse pointer is on the content of a book, you can use a two-finger scroll up or down on a Magic Mouse or trackpad to move through the book.