[vi-kindle] Newspapers and Periodicals on the Kindle
- From: "Russ Kiehne" <russ94577@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <vi-kindle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:45:29 -0700
Here's an excerpt from:
An Accessibility Review of the Amazon Kindle 3
By Ricky Enger
With contributions from Serotalk Staff
Newspapers and Periodicals
As mentioned above, the Kindle can provide access to thousands of newspapers
and
magazines, and this is where the device really shines, both for the blind
and sighted
user. When subscribing to these types of materials, the latest issue will
automatically
be delivered wirelessly to your Kindle as soon as the content becomes
available.
As with books, you may choose the periodical you’d like to read by
navigating to
it from the home screen. Unlike books, however, you have a bit more control
when
navigating this type of content. When you’ve chosen the periodical you’d
like to
read, “voice guide” will announce the option to view sections list. Press
the center
of the 5-way navigation controller to do this. Here, you’ll see a list of
sections
in the periodical which you can navigate using up or down arrows on the
5-way navigation
controller. When you find a section of interest to you, press the right
arrow to
hear how many articles are in the section, and press the center of the
navigation
controller to be taken to the list of articles itself. Navigate the
articles with
the up and down arrows, and press the center button on the article of your
choice.
Unlike the home screen, where “voice guide” speaks the number of pages that
the content
list takes up, navigating the article list within a periodical only gives
the number
of articles in a particular section, but not the number of pages that the
list covers.
This means that if, for example, you have a section containing 12 articles
and you
view the list of articles in that section, you may be initially confused
because
you only see titles for the first two articles in the list. Pressing your
page-up
and page-down keys will allow you to navigate through the remainder of the
articles
in the list, but there is no indication of when you have reached the
beginning or
end of the list.
Once you’ve opened an article by selecting it with the center button, you’ll
need
to turn text-to-speech on to begin reading it. Note that text-to-speech
preferences
for any content you read are not saved, meaning that you will need to enable
text
to speech for each bit of content you open, each time you open it. As
previously
described in the section on reading books, it is not possible to scroll
through text
once text-to-speech has been enabled. In addition, you cannot navigate to
and activate
any links present in the periodical. To be able to do this, navigation
within documents
while text-to-speech is on would need to be supported, and the Kindle
browser itself
would need to be accessible. We very much hope to see both these
enhancements in
a future release.
Despite these issues, we found reading periodicals on the Kindle a very
pleasant
experience. In fact, we found reading this type of material on the Kindle
preferable
to reading it in the browser. Since the interface for navigating through
sections
and articles was quite intuitive, and we didn’t have to skip past navigation
links
or advertisements as we would in a browser, we were able to read periodicals
very
efficiently with the Kindle. We also liked the ability to clip an article
whose
text could later be shared with others. We couldn’t clip particular
passages since
highlighting and selecting is not supported when text-to-speech is on, but
clipping
the article in its entirety was easy. This is done by selecting and opening
the
article, and without enabling text-to-speech, pressing the menu button and
choosing
“clip article”.
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