Hope Kindled in your hand

There are many reasons why disabled people can find books inaccessible. But Amazon’s e-book reader has found several solutions and put them in one slim package, Ian Macrae says

Dexterity issues may make books difficult or painful to handle. Print may be too small to be readable. Dyslexia may impair the ability to make sense of what’s on the page. Or, like me, your vision may not allow you to read print at all.

For whatever reason, the battle for better access to books has had to be fought on many fronts. But always the emphasis has been on making books themselves – the physical entities – available in alternative formats: audio, large print, Braille.

Meanwhile, in another part of the sustainably-grown forest, other forces have been at work.

Enter, from left field, iBooks from Apple and Kindle from Amazon. Both recognised the commercial benefits of making books easily and electronically available. In Apple’s case, this has meant books being downloadable to a range of their products.

But for Amazon it has led to the development of its very own e-book reader, the Kindle. What’s more, a bit of foresight on the part of the company has meant building in a variety of access solutions from the ground up.

For disabled and older people, this has opened up a new set of reading possibilities, and for people like me, that makes it quite simply the most significant development in equality of access to reading since the development of Braille.

Before going further I should say that Amazon hasn’t got everything right. The controls on this slim, flat, pleasant-to-hold e-book reader could be more distinguishable from their surroundings by touch: the chevrons on the page-turning keys on either side of the case could be raised, for example, and the keyboard for inputting text could be better.

Against that, you have the choice of reading in a variety of font-size options, right up to 36 point (about the size of the heading on this page).

For those with dexterity issues there’s no more faffing with separating and turning pages or trying to keep the book flat enough to read: the print appears on a page-sized screen with electronic ink making it look very like the real thing.

There’s one other crucial feature. “Read-To-Me” and “Voiceguide” features can be turned on, giving the option of navig­ating the menus and reading texts via very acceptable synthetic speech.

It’s a shame that, at present, enabling the speech means that users lose the ability to navigate within a text, but this function, Amazon says, is still at an “experimental” stage, so we can hope for improvements in the future.

Despite these and other slight niggles, here’s one user who’ll certainly be reading on.