Narrator: The Kindle Fire has a number of apps available
on it. We're going to concentrate on looking at a book or a document and showing some of
the font changes that you can make if you have difficulty seeing the text.
There's very little changes you can make to the standard interface of the Kindle but if
I go in to a book by tapping it - once a book is open I can then tap the middle of the screen
to get a menu up and there is a setting at the top left called Aa from which I can do
things like change the font size by tapping the larger of the two numbers and I can also
make changes to things like line spacing and margins if I would wish to, to get more text
on the screen. I can also change the colour mode. For instance
I can make the background have less glare on it if I have difficulty with that bright
white that you get. I can also even change it so that the colours are inverted to white
on black. I can further change the actual shape of the
font if I prefer something like the Lucida or the Helvetica font so I can make quite
a number of changes to this so that I can make it easier to read.
On the more options area there is even a text to speech function which I can turn on. Once
the text to speech function is turned on when I tap the middle of the screen there is a
Play / Pause button at the bottom left and I can now tap that to have the book read out
to me. Text to speech: so Alice went on eagerly:
'There is such a nice little dog near our house I should like to show you! A little
bright-eyed terrier, you know' Narrator: Once the speech is on I have to
tap the middle of the screen and press that Play / Pause button again to pause it. There's
very little changes that I can make to the voice but once it's speaking I can actually
change the rate by using the number at the bottom right of the screen.
Text to speech: High speed reading - seemed to be a person of authority among them, called
out, 'Sit down, all of you, and listen to me! I'll soon make you dry enough!' Alice
kept her exes anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch -
Narrator: Having made it faster I have to rotate through the fastest setting before
I go back to the slow setting if I wish to return to a lower value. I can't as it were
go backwards through those settings. Once I've got the book with the magnification
or font settings that I wish then I can simply scroll the book in the usual manner but now
even if I was to close this book and open it again my font settings and the colour settings
would all be remembered for me. The last change that I might want to make
is to have a single column of text. You can of course have a book on the Kindle Fire in
portrait mode or the landscape mode that I have it in now. In the landscape mode it defaults
to having two columns of text but I may prefer to have a single column. In portrait mode
there is only a single column view available. The settings which I have demonstrated also
take effect when I go into any of the documents such as a Word document that I have transferred
from another computer on here and I could if I wished have this one read out to me as
well. Text to speech: Microsoft Office Word. 1 Introduction.
This briefing sheet provides a short introduction -
Narrator: I hope you found that short introduction to the Kindle Fire HD facilities for a reader
with low vision useful.