link to download the pdf
I have lost track a bit of which photos I have used before, so apologies for any repeats.
Today here at Michael's bookshop in Ramsgate where I work I really haven't done any work. I have been trying to make the Kindle book reader in its various forms work in some sort of disability accessibility mode.
I have tinnitus which means that it's very useful for me to be able to get the the phone to read aloud through my sound cancelling headphones, this tends to reduce my tinnitus when I am in a loud environment like a supermarket.
The different kindles have different pros and cons so taking one at a time here are the three options that is assuming that you don't have a huge amount of money to throw around.
Option 1 is the Kindle fire this is available in Argos for about £50 it's basically a not very good tablet. It's what happens when you get an Amazon version of Android which doesn't allow you to do things like choose the browser you want. It's not that bad at displaying books. Not so very good if what you're reading happens to be an epic poem in my Metamorphosis as it doesn't seem to quite know where the lines of the poem should stop, making it very difficult to read. On the disability related accessibility issues it is reasonably feasible to get it to read aloud to you in an American accent and a less good UK English accent. Not anything like as good as the UK english voices available on an ordinary android phone.
Option 2 is a second-hand Kindle paperwhite you can pick this type thing up in phone shops or CEX shop or on eBay at around the £30 ballpark. In many ways it's more like book, more like looking at paper because the screen's not lit, reading aloud it's better formatted takes a bit of getting used to but the choice language is of very limited so it pretty much has to be an American accent.
Option 3 is the Android app so that you can put you can put Kindle books you have bought onto your mobile phone this is pretty cranky and seems to pretty much stop the disabled accessibility part of Google from working at all, I don't think it should do this.
From the point of view of an ordinary leisure reader, the intrusion of "a device" takes a bit of getting used to and I don't get the feeling that any of the Kindle versions really address the problem screens have on brain function.
The most relaxed and therapeutic read still seems to be the paper book, that said I think there is a place for all of the Kindle versions, depending on your personal circumstances.
Anyway a whole day on the learning curve, I am beginning to form a much better idea why the e-reader hasn't really caught on and so many people are returning to paper books. Not straightforward though and nailing some of the issues is complex.
Back in the world of real books
link to the books we put out today
yesterday's answers
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.