Umm, the fact that a program has a read allowd (adobe, kendel, so forth) doesn't help the visually impaired user one single bit if the said user can't get to the content to tell it to read outloud to begin with. Again, I point to braille on the keys of the mac machines. What good is it to have the keys accessible if the screen remains unusable? The same exact concept applies here. Not every blind/visually impaired user is going to have sighted assistance to open the book of their choice, and get to the read aloud function of said book. And, just for reference, I'm in the us, but the us has had (and still does) copyright exempt laws for quite some time, so regardless of what ebook makers claim, it is *not* illegal for me to rip copyright protection off of a book in order to make it possible for me to read it. Of course, in practice, this is rarely worth the effort it takes to track down such applications, nor is it worth the effort it takes for me to develop such a program myself (which I have done on occasion), generally because, in most cases, books are available elsewhere in accessible formats, but it's those few percent of books that are not available elsewhere that cause problems, and the absolute pits that fictionwise support has dropped into lately is rapidly pushing me to abandon reading some of my favorite magazines (analog and asimov) just because it is no longer cost effective for me to do so. I'll just go back to subscribing to the nls version, and let fictionwise keep their lack of subscriptions, gift cards, zip downloads, and the myriad of other complaints I've asked about in the past 3-4 months. Apparently they don't feel it necessary to answer most support emails anymore, and when they do, it's usually with a canned response that tells me to read the faq or something equally silly, since the whole reason for writing is because the faq says something and the site doesn't mesh with what it says. Nevermind the fact that I've been a member (of the buywise club for that matter) for nearly 10 years, and you can see why I prefer places like pg and webscriptions.net even if it doesn't give me access to everything I'd like to read. On Mar 7, 2011, at 9:09 AM, a@aboq.org wrote:
Hi Travis,
Isn't the Kindle's integrated text-to-speech feature useful for your purposes? Like I mentioned, it's very easy to convert any and all EPUB files, HTML files, TXT files, RTF files, PDF files, etc., into Kindle's native format (MOBI or PRC). And then, the Kindle would read the content to you aloud, wouldn't it? (It's kind of funny, because even if you load a non-English text into a Kindle and switch on the text-to-speech feature, the guy or lady will just go ahead and read the entire foreign text as if it consisted of English words, which means: they will mispronounce every word, and many people here in non-English Europe find that pretty funny to listen to.) :-D
PS: I believe here in Slovakia, sight-impaired people enjoy an exemption from the copyright laws which allows them unlimited owning and/or copying/sharing of electronic versions of any/all books they might be interested in. They have set up their own password-protected electronic library. I have communicated about this with the library's managers.
-- Yours, Alex. www.aboq.org
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