Hi everybody.
What do we like for reading longer texts? Mostly books, but I'm trying to generalize a bit. On Windows I use QRead for most things, because I can have multiple files open, select and copy text if needed, and it generally saves my place in whatever's open. For Kindle I use Kindle, obviously, if it's web stuff I'll often just read it in Firefox.
If there's an odder format, e.g. .rtf, I just use whatever opens it. I don't know that there's something like QRead on Mac, so I'm not necessarily looking for that, although if there is, great. I generally have stuff in .epub, .pdf, probably some Word docs, .txt., maybe some .rtf.
I might be missing some format or other, but that should cover most of it. Bookmarking in whatever app or set of apps we've got would be nice, but I guess I could just leave whatever app(s) open and put the machine to sleep to keep my place. I have no idea what's out there for a pleasant read on the Mac, so I'd really appreciate learning about whatever everybody's using.
Comments
Notmany choices
Speech Central works great on the Mac, and Voice Dream Reader is compatible. I would go Speech Central. One more app that I do not recommend is Easy Reader.
Thanks.
I'll check those out. But I'm also fine if there's say, a great app for dealing with Bookshare books,another for.pdf,another for .rtf,and so on.
I just mentioned QRead because it's what I'm using now, so if there's not a single app that handles most things, that's fine too.
I'm way more interested in bookmarking if possible, and I'd
actually prefer something that uses standard VO commands.
For reading long texts on a…
For reading long texts on a Mac, Apple Books works well for ePub and PDFs, letting you bookmark and sync across devices. If you need something that handles more file types, Calibre is a good open-source option for ePub, PDF, and more.
Skim is a simple app for reading and annotating PDFs, while Microsoft Word or Pages can handle Word docs and .rtf files. The Kindle app is great if you have Kindle books, letting you read on any device
Avoid Kindle on the mac
Last time I tested this 3 months ago it is not accessible at all like its ios or windows counterpart. Basically you can read only the full 1 page without any formatting at a time and it just doesn't work for navigation. Unless things have changed since then? I would too recommend easy reader. Voicedream despite its latest dramma is still the only app to support acapela tts voices (and only on ios). If this is not a factor for you then by all mean just stick with speech central which you can get for free as a voiceover user. When I know I won't be reading cross platform then I can choose apple books, it works mostly fine with some minor bugs. Google play books is also an option although I don't know if you can even import your own files there? Probably yes. (Edit: yes you definitely can do that).
A question for applevis as well from me, since calibre is made with qt, how is its accessibility on the mac?
Hope this helps.
Preview for Pdfs
If you are Using Mac OS Sequoia, Preview and voiceover got mutch better handeling Pdf reading experienses. Voiceover recognise the text format and gives a smooth experiense.
How do you get Speech Central for free?
I checked the Microsoft store and the app store, they're both paid, looks like ten bucks on the Mac App store.
Or does it detect Voiceover and offer a free download? I can't see how. But I am just looking at the app store on Windows right now.
Reading
@Cankut DeÄŸerli How has Preview support improved in Sequoia? Is it now possible to properly navigate by links, headings, tables, etc in PDF documents? Has the latest version of Pages improved this as well? When I tried it in Ventura on my 2013 Air via OCLP, I could use the rotor to navigate, but it didn't always seem to show all elements, and standard commands like VO Command L for link, H for heading, etc didn't work.
Re: Reading
For Preview, yes. You can use command+VO+H to go to headdings for example. I haven't checked it for Pages yet, so I can not say anything to that. But preview is very smooth now.
Problems I've seen with Preview
I'm about to rant about PDFs. Before I do, thanks for the reading app recommendations. I, too, would like to know how to get Speech Central for free. It sounds like a great tool.
Rant follows.
In the early days of hypertext markup, the server provided content and appearance was left to the web browser. That wasn’t good enough for corporate marketing departments, who wanted greater control over how content looked. Thus, PDF was born, and accessibility became its roadkill.
When I use VoiceOver to read PDFs in Preview, I frequently encounter text read out of order (such as the page header read last instead of first), or blocks of text that break along illogical boundaries (for example, a block of text containing a single letter, or a block of text that contains multiple paragraphs).
It’s unclear to me why apps capable of presenting a PDF page in a way that makes sense visually are utterly unable to share that text with VoiceOver in the same logical manner. Not just Preview, but any PDF software. And this is an issue that has remained unaddressed for over two decades.
Preview, and safari for that…
Preview, and safari for that matter, has the biggest advantage of speed as adobe acrobat on windows is very slow in the first place and especially with screen readers whether you use nvda or jaws.
But yeah preview is generally good on mac.
iBooks on macOS Usable?
Unless I'm doing something very wrong, I can't even get it to continuously scroll and be read with VO say all. It works fine—well, sort of, it sometimes misses lines in the text, but at least it scrolls—on iOS. But not macOS.
I'm not a big fan of any of the reader apps for the blind on macOS though I acknowledge that at least they work. The abstraction is powerful on iPhone because you can wear earbuds and control them that way, treating TTS as though audio. But on a Mac where you've got a full-fat keyboard, having the screen reader do the job it was designed for seems to me to be the correct way of going about things.
What do you think?
Apple Books
I've just started to try to read a book on Apple Books and whilst it works it's not a very impressive experience. I'm trying to read line by line rather than having it just read to me. In this case I have found that sometimes Apple Book just won't read something. For example, I have a bullet list with 3 list items. I go to the first one and it reads it, then VO+right and the second one is read, but when I vo+right again it misses out the first half of the third bullet, so I get a random half sentence that doesn't make sense. This doesn't happen in the same book on iPhone.
I find the navigate by chapter commands are quite bad with VoiceOver. Rather than actually going backwards or forwards by a single chapter, they just fling you some random distance. If you are lucky then you may find that VoiceOver knows where you are, but sometimes I think it gets confused. I had one occurrence where I was reading a page, then I would vo+right and it would just move to some content that was a few chapters away. I literally couldn't get to the bit in the middle. I ended up quitting Books and then it appeared on restart.
Navigate by headings doesn't seem to work - maybe it just goes to the visible headings which isn't that helpful. If I'm lucky it might find one.
I think probably the best way to navigate around is Cmd+T to use the table of contents.
I also tried to get it to just read the book to me. It looks like there are maybe reading controls like Voice Dream. has. It looks like Space should start and stop reading, but it only seems to read one thing at a time then stops.
This has just the feel of most Apple MacOs apps - they are maybe just about usable but pretty torturous to use.
Maybe I'm missing the magic incantation that makes it work properly.
I use VO-a.
It mostly reads, sometimes misses things every once in a while, and pauses mostly at chapter boundaries. Then you either have to VO-right, hit right arrow to move to a new page and then back a page sometimes, or use the next page button. It depends on the book though, some are fairly bad. So it's not great, but at least i can read most stuff now, I've been hitting Bookshare. Considering when I switched it really didn't do much of anything, see also the accessibility issues with Apple Music in the beginning of 15, it's a definite improvement.
I just kind of look at it as how things work. It's not much different than, say, having to OCR a graphical PDF if i want to read it and it's not accessible. That's not to say that it can't be improved, true continuous reading would be nice, as well as reading line by line or whatever. But I guess for me I just go, OK, this is what I haveto do to use it, can I deal with it or not? If not, I can always go back to Windows or something.
Re: mostly reads
It doesn't give you much hope when the best Apple can do in what should be a relatively simple app is "it mostly reads".
I get if it's doing OCR or anything complicated then it's going to be error prone, but this is just text in an ebook. It's really not good enough.
Apple's own Mac apps are largely speaking quite pathetic in my (admittedly curmudgeonly) opinion.
The VO+A option is probably a good one, although it seems odd to have all those playback features in the app when they seem to be pretty useless.
(Apologies for the rant)
Is Speech Central good for reading with VO keys or is it really designed for you to hit play and sit back and listen?