Last year, we brought our VoiceView screen reader to Kindle E-readers. This week, I’m excited to announce our update to the Kindle for PC app, making it easier for visually impaired customers to find and read millions of Kindle books. Customers can now use the popular, open source NVDA screen reader to find and open Kindle books on a Windows PC.
Over 6 million books already have screen reader support, with more being added all the time.
Peter Korn
Using NVDA, customers can read books by character, word, line, page, and continuously (with pages turning automatically). Customers can highlight text, add notes, perform dictionary and Wikipedia lookups, and copy text to the clipboard. Additionally, readers will experience improved discoverability of various book highlights and notes while reading—these types of annotations will now be spoken in the context of the story versus at the end via one list. NVDA users with an attached braille display can also enjoy Kindle books in braille. Additionally, whenever publishers provide “ALT text” descriptions of images in their books, Kindle for PC now supports them in the screen reader.
Customers can experience the new PC screen reader support today – first install the NVDA 2017.1 release, and then install the latest Kindle for PC app.
Over 6 million books already have screen reader support, with more being added all the time — to check on a specific book, go to its detail page on Amazon.com and look for the new “Screen Reader: Supported” designation next to other helpful information about the book like whether it supports Word Wise or Audible Narration. One example of a popular title with screen reader support, as well as ALT text for many of the images, is: Dinosaurs Before Dark (Magic Tree House Book 1).
Separately, last year, we updated VoiceView on Kindle E-readers, which now includes the ability to have audio delivered over Bluetooth, reading by character and word, and phonetic spelling. And Kindle for iOS, Android, and FireOS now includes the OpenDyslexic font that we premiered last year on Kindle E-readers. Information about the accessibility of Amazon’s devices and services can be found on our accessibility page at http://www.amazon.com/accessibility.
We continue to work hard to improve Kindle accessibility for our customers and welcome feedback at kindle-accessibility-feedback@amazon.com.