[vi-kindle] My Letter to Amazon Accessibility Feedback
- From: Craig Werner <craig_werner@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: vi-kindle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 06:29:15 -0400
Greetings to the list.
I have just sent the following letter to
kindle-pc-accessibility-feedback@xxxxxxxxxxx I'll report bacck when I
get a response.
Craig
Dear Amazon Kindle Accessibility Support:
I am a retired English professor and a blind user of the Kindle for PC
with Accessibility
Plugin software.
Recently, I encountered an unexpected problem. I was reading the Table
of Contents
for _Frommer's New Mexico_
and decided to read the sixth chapter of the text. I pressed the
"Search" hotkey,
"Control-F" and entered "Chapter 6" into the edit box. The results list
pointed
to
passages in which the author refers the reader to sections in Chapter
Six, but the
start of the chapter itself was not
flagged. When my wife took a look at the Table of Contents, she noticed
that each
chapter number was followed by a colon.
When I entered the string "Chapter 6:" I got the result I desired: one
of the results
pointed to the top of
Chapter Six.
It appears that the software's search engine is doing a whole-word
search with the
colon being considered as part of a word. However, since punctuation is
not spoken
by the Nuance speech engine, and since there appears to be no way of
toggling it
on, the blind user would not know of
the colon or other punctuation mark after a chapter number and would
likely fall
victim to the same confusion that befell me.
There is a hint that the search is a whole=-word one since when one
types "Control-F,"
one hears the message "Type a word
here and hit Enter to start the search." However, this text is not
specific enough
to indicate strongly to the user that
entering a part of a word would not produce a desired result.
I am wondering if the software can be modified so that it would look for
an exact
string and flag it as a result. For
example, I would like to see the search string "Chapter 6" produce
results pointing
to occurrences in the text such as "Chapter 6," "Chapter 6:," "Chapter
66" etc.
Thank you very much for reading this somewhat long request.
Sincerely yours,
Craig Werner
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