Blio eReader Beta
- From: "Gary King" <w4wkz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 11:55:54 -0600
For those of you who like to play with beta software with little or no help or
documentation, you can go to the Downloads link at
http://www.blio.com
and search for beta. Under the words Accessibility Beta, you will find the
Download Button. They are recommending either JFW 11 or 12.
Once the beta is installed, you will find 3 books in the Library View that you
can download by pressing Enter on each of them. You will find that you can
read them using the PC cursor. You can let JFW read the book continuously, or
you can move by character, word, and line. I don't believe the formatting of
the pages is preserved very well though when reading with JFW. It's a good
thing that JFW can read the books to you since I've noticed that the Read Aloud
feature is disabled in many of the books in the Book Store and even in the
sample books in the Library View.
Now we come to the Blio Book Store, which is only available through the program
itself. You will probably wear out your Tab key navigating it. There are
several lists of featured books, and you can search for your favorite title or
author. I thought at first that all of the books in the various lists weren't
being displayed. If the text said that the list was showing 1 to 24 books, I
could only find 6 by using my Down-Arrow. As it turned out, the books were not
in a vertical list, but in columns, so that I had to use the Right-Arrow as
well as the Down-Arrow to find them all. Not a standard list box. If you're
brave enough to buy a book using beta software, let us know if it goes well or
if your money disappears down a black hole.
I was not brave enough to purchase a book from the book store, so I selected
the Free Books View from the menu and searched Google Books for my favorite
dead authors. I got a couple of Sherlock Holmes books to read.
That's about all I've learned about the Blio eReader beta so far. Let us know
how you make out if you try it with JAWS for Windows. I've found that it
doesn't work so well with the 7.5 beta of Window-Eyes. Some of the buttons in
the store just say button, button, button. Not so surprising that the beta
works better with JFW, since it was the screen reader they used for testing.
To be fair though, Window-Eyes didn't have the support needed for Blio until
now.
Gary King
mailto:w4wkz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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