We have been making steady improvements to the accessiblility of our Kindle e-books and the Kindle reading experience. Earlier this year we added support for ALT text for images to Kindle e-books, which we made available to blind and low vision customers on Kindle for PC and on Fire OS with VoiceView. Today we are delighted to announce support for accessible math equations.
Customers can use the 2017.4 release of the popular open source NVDA screen reader to read math equations in Kindle e-books. NVDA is able to parse equations encoded in MathML, allowing customers to navigate within those math equations as well as review them via Nemeth math codes on a connected braille display. Publisher provided ALT text for math equations is also supported, and is available to blind and low vision customers using NVDA, as well as via the VoiceView screen reader on Fire Tablets. Already hundreds of Kindle e-Books are available with accessible math equations.
In the past few months we’ve also added a number of text rendering features to Kindle book reading across many of our reading surfaces. On Kindle e-Readers, iOS, Fire OS, Android, and PC customers can choose the OpenDyslexic font, adjust page margins, adjust line spacing, and select right ragged text rendering. On the all-new Kindle Oasis, as well as current releases of Kindle reader on iOS, FireOS, and Android, customers can choose from a number of font boldness options, incresing the weight of any font used within the Kindle e-book. Also available on the all-new Kindle Oasis is a Large Display option to increase the size of the user interface on several key screens, and Invert Black and White for customers who prefer white text and graphics on a black backround. Invert Black and White applies to the entire user interface as well as e-book content. See the full list of Kindle accessiblity features on our Kindle Accessibility page.
Additionally, we have updated the gesture language for our VoiceView customers on Fire Tablets, introducing a host of new features, paired with new and improved gestures for using them. VoiceView customers have consistently asked us to go beyond the stock Android screen reader gestures, and now all existing VoiceView customers on our 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th generation Tablets are receiving a free, over-the-air update to Fire OS 5.6.0, which includes the new VoiceView gestures. The new gestures/features include the Stop Speech command (two-finger single-tap), Turn Screen Curtain On/Off (three-finger triple-tap) and the new Learn Mode for gesture practice (four-finger double-tap). These are all described on our CS help page “Guide to VoiceView Screen Reader for Fire Tablet”.
It remains Day 1 for accessibility at Amazon and we will continue to refine these experiences for all customers across our product lineup. Let us know how you are using Kindle e-Books at kindle-accessibility-feedback@amazon.com, and how you are using the VoiceView screen reader at device-accessibility@amazon.com; we’d love to hear from you.
Trending news and stories