Creating Accessible eReader Formats: A How-To Story

A growing number of students are finding that the scalability of text size, integrated dictionary, and text-to-speech options of the Amazon Kindle and Apple's iPad are fantastic features. They also enjoy the speed of purchase, lighter physical load, and (often) lower purchase price, as do their peers. A growing number of textbooks are available in this way.

But what happens when a student with a print disability depends on those formats in order to have access to the text...and it's not available for purchase in that format? Enter Disability Resources! I'm going to focus in this post on how we create those formats in response to some colleague questions. Info on the legalities and suchlike for our students is available elsewhere.

Tips & Tricks in Using a Kindle for Academic Reading

With the dawn of the iPad on the scene, some people are wondering why they'd bother with a Kindle. After all, the Kindle can't play games or surf the web (ok, it can, but it's k.l.u.n.k.y.)--or at least, not yet it can't. I've posted before about Kindle accessibility and the advantages and disadvantages of a Kindle for students with disabilities. There have been several pilot programs with the Kindle for college-level reading and they have started posting their results. Examples include Reed College and Princeton University. For the sake of argument, here, let's just assume you have a Kindle, and talk about doing academic reading on one of these bad boys.

Locating Info Within the Book

I'm a very visual person. I use highlighting and margin notes in my books now in order to do one thing: remember where on the page to locate information I may want to use again. Often, I highlight quotes I may want to use in a paper, or I will write a phrase that summarizes a couple of paragraphs and include arrows or brackets. When I go back to what I was reading in order to use it, I use these visual cues to help me locate information. With a physical book, I can flip through the pages and locate what I want. Flipping through the pages is a no-can-do on the Kindle. You'll have to approach it a little differently.

While you're reading:

• Make generous use of Kindle's highlighting feature. Conventional wisdom says to highlight between 10-15% of the material in a physical book. Because you are going to use these highlights differently, shoot for 20% or so. Err on the side of highlighting more than you think you'll need.
  
• Keep the highlights relatively short. The bigger your preferred font size, the shorter you should make your highlights. The reason: when you view My Notes & Marks, where the Kindle stores your highlights, it will display between two (big font size) and size (small font size) lines of highlight. If you are trying to locate something and it's below that cutoff line, you won't see it when you're scrolling through the Notes & Marks.
• Type your notes as tags, not conventional notes. Typing on the Kindle is a bit of a, well, pain in the gluteus. The less you have to do, the easier it will be. Think of your notes as labels (tags) that will help you get back to related content. You can put multiple tags in a note, if you want. I also don't worry about capitalization or punctuation in the notes as it just slows the note entry process further. A bonus of this practice is that it encourages you to make concise (1 word!) summaries of the material you're reading, which will help your retention and comprehension. (For example, the tags I'd create for this paragraph are: tag, label, category, summary, notes, suggestions. Yours might be different from mine!)

Finding the information again:

• Search! The search feature in the Kindle is pretty darn handy. If you remember a key word or phrase (the shorter the better, by the way) that can help you locate a passage again, search for it. You can also search just your tags (notes) by typing in the search word, then moving the 5-way button to the right until it highlights 'notes'.
• View your marks. In the Menu, select "View My Notes & Marks" (one book) or in the Home screen select "My Clippings" (all your books). Because, again, I'm recommending a generous use of highlighting, there will be several pages of marks. While this is a little time-consuming to flip through, it is significantly faster than trying to remember where you saw that one thing and going through page turn after page turn in the full book. In one book I was using for my last paper, I had 72 pages of notes and marks. However, I was always able to find what I was looking for...which is kinda the point, right?
  

Citations

There's just not a lot of agreeement out there on how to cite Kindle books. The lack of real page numbers makes specific references just a bit wonky. However, the folks at the APA were kind enough to actually address citing the Kindle. For other style formats (MLA, Chicago, etc.), the consensus seems to be to consider it an online/electronic, unpaginated source. Remember, cite the version you read. If you read the Kindle, cite it. If you read the physical book, cite that. If you read it on Google Books, cite that.

Those Darn PDFs

One of the best - and worst - features of the Kindle is its ability to read PDFs. Yes, you can read PDFs natively on the Kindle with no conversion process by either sending them through Amazon's service (cheap) or connecting your Kindle to your computer with the USB cord and dragging the PDFs to the Documents folder on your Kindle (free). However, you can't annotate, change sizes, have the Kindle read it aloud, or any of the other features that make the Kindle such a good reader. I'm going to let you in on a secret that will make this easier... shhh, lean in a little closer....

Go download Calibre.

Free. Open source. End of problem. Wish I'd discovered this three terms ago when I first got my Kindle.

Kindle - Friend or Foe? A Review of the Kindle DX

If you follow accessibility news at all, you've probably heard some of the kerfuffle about the Amazon Kindle. For those who don't want to follow the link, I'll try to sum up the issues quickly:

• Starting with the Kindle 2, text-to-speech is available. This means that alternate format text is instantly available with no conversion, no extra cost, no extra time... to everyone who might benefit from it.
• Only the book text can be read aloud. Menus, other functions, and PDF files are not accessible through text-to-speech.
• The Authors' Guild got concerned about copyright rights.
• Amazon agreed to turn off the text-to-speech function on specific books or whole catalogs at the publisher's request.
  
• So far, 33 disability organizations have joined ReadingRights.org in an effort to make this new advancement available for all. This would include keeping text-to-speech intact on all books and extending it to the menus and other functions.
• Injunctions have been filed against several postsecondary institutions who are participating in a pilot project with Amazon; the basis is that the device and content are not accessible.
  

But, is the Kindle worth the fuss?

I bought a Kindle DX about a month ago so that I could have access to the books and scholarly articles I'm reading for my doctoral work without having to lug them all with me. I wanted the DX rather than the smaller, lighter, and less expensive Kindle 2 because the DX has the capability of handling native PDF files, rather than going through the rather cumbersome process of sending them to Amazon for conversion. What's been my reaction?

Love it.

But I don't have a disability that affects my reading, so how I evaluate it personally and how I evaluate it for student use might be different, right? Yes and no. Let's break it down.

Reasons to Buy a Kindle if You Are a Student With a Print Disability

• All the reasons that everyone else would buy a Kindle! Cool factor; much lighter than carrying 3,500 texts (on the DX - 1,500 on the 2); free wireless; immediate access to thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers (including an increasing number of textbooks); book samples; great display; ability to change font size on the fly; highlighting, annotations; text to speech...
• For students with low vision, the ability to change font size is great. Depending on your functional vision, it may not be large enough. A test-drive is absolutely recommended before plunking down the cash. You will probably want to have a handheld magnifier about though, as the menus and other functions, as well as the Amazon Store, don't enlarge.
• Text-to-speech is a big deal, and it's available for the large majority of items. The voices are quite tolerable and do have speed adjustments. More importantly, text-to-speech is available without waiting for someone else (me) to convert it. Buy and read. That's it. Doesn't that sound wonderful?
• For those textbooks that aren't yet available in the Amazon store, I can convert your text to a format that can be read on the Kindle. This is no different from the other text conversion services here at SOU; only the end product is different.
• There are thousands of free books out there at Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, and other sites. You can read these on the Kindle as well.
• For students with mobility impairments affecting your neck and/or spine, reading on the Kindle is pretty darn nifty. There are covers that double as a book stand so that you can read at a 90-degree angle quite comfortably. The buttons are large enough and have enough tactile response to be relatively easy to manipulate.
  

Reasons Not to Buy a Kindle If You Are a Student with a Print Disability

• Currently, the Kindle is not accessible for users who are blind. Frustrating, but true.
• It's not cheap. The Kindle 2 is currently going for $299, and the DX is $489. Yikes.
  
• Your text-to-speech capability is in the hands of Amazon... with no guarantees that it will continue to be available to you. This is worrisome.
• Some degree of fine-motor control is necessary to be able to operate the 5-way button (scroll and select functions) and the keyboard. Other buttons, especially the two you'll use most often - next page and previous page - are fairly large and can be manipulated with a closed fist.

What's your thoughts on the Kindle? Shout 'em out in the comments!

Open Letter to Amazon.com

Dear Amazon.com,
The community of people with print disabilities were all a-twitter about the Kindle 2. Readers who use their ears to read - those who are visually impaired, have learning disabilities, are learning English, or are functionally illiterate - were excited to finally have a mass-marketed, accessible device that allows them to read. No "special" devices. Books, newspapers, and magazines would be available to them at the same way, at the same time, and AT THE SAME PRICE as they are to everyone else. What a great idea!

But then you allowed authors and publishers to block that great idea.

I work at a regional university. One of my responsibilities is to ensure that students with print disabilities have accessible textbooks. Frankly, I was really hoping that the Kindle could help. I'd love it if our students could just buy a textbook that is accessible to them. Just this morning, I had a student ask me about the Kindle 2 - whether it might work for her, and how she might be able to fund it. It hurt to have to tell her about the decision you have made to allow authors and publishers to block access to text-to-speech, but it wouldn't be responsible of me to let her assume, based on early press, that she's have that accessibility to all the great texts that you have.

Please, Amazon, reconsider.