Kindle Queries

Hello there!

I may not be able to answer all of your questions, but I can answer at least 1 or 2 of them.

First, Kindle App from Amazon is accessible! After some lobbying, Amazon has finally made the app acceisible with voiceover! While I cannot speak for macs or PC.'s in terms of accessibility, I can & am going to vouge for accessibility on Ios. I honestily think your ios device with the Kindle app on it would be more accessible to you simply because it already has voiceur*r built in. I have read a few Kindle books on my ipad & really enjoy it! Here's one thing I will tell you. If you find a book you want/need, you must go to the Amazon iite & pupchase it. What you can do is add books to your wish list from the Kindle app. You cannot purchase Kindle books from the Amazon app you must go to Amazon's site to purchase them.

I know you can seahch for text in books, but I'm not sure if you can copy said text into a .doc file. I'd try it & see since the app is free to download.

I'm going to point you toward two resources that helped me figure out how to work the Kindle app.

1. The Kindle app podcast on Applevis

I listened to this podcast 2 or 3 times & tried doing what they did a few times until I got the hang of it. If you go to the Kindle app page in the ios app directory, you'll find a link to the podcast. Just search Kindle & click on the app directory link & go from there.

2. This book helped me a lot because it was like a little manual

The person that did the podcast demonstration of the Kindle app talked about it. The book it called: Kindle For iOS Accessibility Gestures Quick Reference Guide. Best of all, it's a free download! I keep it on my ipad just in case. And it's really a very simple book.

Ij's sad that you are having so much trouble finding resources in your college library. I think you should try the Kindle app because they have just about every book you could imagine. Plus they have newspapers & magazines too! I haven't explored reading a magazine or newspaper on the Kindle yet but I can't wait to try it out!

You'll burn through your Amazon card or whatever money source you use to purchase your books. I know I did but that's because I'm just an avid bookworm! lol Plus if you live in an area (as do I) that you have to pay tax on Amazon products then that factors in too. But I strongly advise you to use your Kindle app on your ios device rather than a traditional kindle tablet just because you'll already have guaranteed accessibility thanks to Apfle!

I know I may not have answered all of your questions, but I still do hope that you find this post helpful to you. I have had mn Kindle app for a few months now, & I can safely say that I really love it! It has everything I could ever want: it's accessible & I have a virtually ENDLESS supply of books, newspapers & magazines.

I wish you loads of luck & again I really hope this bhas helped you at

Hi,

I suspect the difficulty you will find is citations. Like you, I have not found a way to get precise page citations in Kindle books on IOS as it seems that the book is divided into locations, rather than pages. Perhaps it will work if you bookmark or highlight certain passages you want to cite, but for myself I'm not sure how to get round this. Just on a related point, have you checked the extent to which your university subscribes to electronic resources through, for instance, Open Athens? Perhaps there are databases for your course that provide you with a pretty good electronic library free of charge. Also, many university libraries in the UK can now scan portions of books you need, or the whole book if you need the whole book, if they have the requisite licenses to do this. consider these alternatives alongside the Kindle purchases because if they're available to you, they'll at least be free. I have to say, though, the Kindle app on IOS is magnificent. I use it for my newspaper of choice now, and it's so wonderful to read a book review in the sunday Telegraph and buy the book there and then, as I did the other day with Gun Button to Fire by Tom Mitchell, a cracking read if you are interested in the battle of Britain.

If copying excerpts from Kindle books is important to you, I'd suggest you perform a test to make sure you can do what you want to do. I don't think it's possible, but perhaps I just never found the correct way to do it. If it's possible, I hope someone will describe how it's done.

I'm mostly reading this thread to learn about Kindle, so I can't help you much with that. As far as citations in papers, you probably should cite the actual media you are using; ie a Kindle eBook, or something like that. If there are no page numbers, depending on the citation style, you would probably cite the chapter and section; MLA and Chicago styles call for this, if I remember correctly.

Speaking with my senior lecturer's hat on, it's very important that you check what citation convention your course requires and use that and not any other. Most postgraduate courses in the social sciences in the UK, for example, will require the Harvard system, which does not always require page numbers. For law, however, the Oscola (Oxford system for the citation of legal authority) convention is used, and page numbers (not sections of a Kindle eBook) are required there. @maldalain I don't know what course it is you are doing, but I would be very surprised if your university does not subscribe to any electronic resources through, for instance, eduserve Open Athens. If they do not, then even with Kindle eBooks it is not fair that you should have to buy the whole book that a sighted person could read in the university library, so this is something your university disabilities officer should be looking into. If you are a member of the NUS (National union of students) you should also speak to your welfare reps. I'm not saying your Kindle idea sin't a good one; it is. but the cost even of Kindle books does mount up.

That makes a great deal of sense and to be honest once you're at that level of posttgraduate study you are free to choose what you wish. Glad you have a system that works and that will be enhanced by the addition of Kindle eBooks and best of luck with the PHD.

Good luck with your studies and let us know what you think of the Kindle books.
You all have gotten me curious and I'm going to have to go hunt down an APA style manual now... LOL

Hello! Glad we were able to help you! There is a sync option in the Kindle app. It syncs it to the cloud. That way, if yo delete a book or you have a book you bought & haven't yet downloaded it & you need/want to, you can get it without having to re-purchase it!

Everything you need to know including a podast that gives a tutorial on how to work the app, can be found right here on AppleVis! For your convience, I have copied & pades the link in this post for you. You will find it below. Good luck & I hope this helps. I hope you do good in your studies!

www.applevis.com/apps/ios/books/kindle-%E2%80%93-read-books-ebooks-magazines-newspapers-textbooks

I give this bit of advice to anyone when it comes to trying out a knew app. While I like reading manuals & learning from tutorials, I also am a tech savvy person. I love playing with teconology. When I got my first braillenote in 2nd grade, my specialist at the time taught me some things, but I guess I just got tired of doinging that way. So I'd take it home & I'd try & do what I learned that week/day on my own & then I iust started playing with it by myself. I used a braillenote for years, & I still need one because braille has been a significant part of my life ever since I was 6 months old. My point is, I played with the Braillenote, & please don't think I'm bragging when I say this, but I know a bit more about that thing than the techs at HumanWare! I can't take it apart & fix it by any means, but when it comes to a lot of problems that I've had & that usually happen with braillenotes, I can usually work out what the problem is. I applied that same philosophy to my ipad mini 4. A very gracious person spent 90 minutes with me that first day, & before we even got to the car that day, I was happy. In a sinse, I guess you'd still call me a noobie because I've only had it for about 3 or 4 months. All I'm trying to say to you is, there's nothing like opening an app or even if it's any other technology & just playing with it & when something breaks, banging on it until you figure out what caused the problem, how to fix it & more importantly, how to make 2ure it doesn't happen again!

I strongly advise you download the book: Kindle for ios accessibility gestures: quick reference guide. It's free & it'll give you a chance to play with the app & also learn in a quick concise way how to operate the Kindle app. I downloaded it, & I still have it on my ipad just in case I need to refer back to it. And please do check out that link as well.

Hi,
I love the kindle app, but there’s one thing I’ve never been able to do, that I’d like assistance with, & that is, selecting text.
Since, “text selection” isn’t a rotor option, when inside a book, & the method they use, where you double-tap & hold, while sliding your finger is extremely unreliable, what’s the recommended way to select a specific piece of text while reading a book?

Hello. I deeply value the Kindle app. I have over two thousand Kindle books bought over the past seven years since the app became accessible. Most of the app couldn't be better. It's a great reading system. Double tap on the book you're reading to get acces to the menu. Flick right and double tap on the navigation drawer to easily get around a book. When not needed, all of the navigation and extras are out of your way.
Copying text from a book sadly isn't easy. If you double tap and hold on text of an open book, a menu of options pops up. One option lets you get definitions of selected text. Selecting that text is rather clunky. Flick right over the menu options past the highlighting and you'll find left most and right most sliders. You can flick up or down to move them until the text you want is in between the sliders. AFter that, You can use the "copy text" or other options in the menu to act on the selected text. You may have to lift your finger and find the menu options after selecting your text with the sliders.
As for learning your location in a book, you can find that at the end of the main book menu accessed when double tapping on a book's text. Flick right and you'll eventually get to a location number rather than a page. Perhaps, this would do when it comes to citations.
Another source of books students should check out is CRC Press. They use the Vital Source Bookshelf app which is very accessible and they focus on text books. If I needed a text book, I'll check them first. Kindle is great for pretty much everything else.else

It’s been made clear that kindle App for IOS is awesome, but nobody has answered your questions regarding Mac and PC.

I actually really like the PC version. There seem to be more bugs than on the IOS version, and said bugs take longer to get fixed, but I like it. For instance, for a while, there was a bug that caused you to get moved about a page further along in your book when you went to another window and came back. This would happen with both JAWS and NVDA. This bug was fixed with the latest version. I am pretty sure you can copy and paste on the PC though it’s been a while since I’ve tried it. I’ll give it a shot later today.

For what you need, the Mac is going to be a non-starter. Installing and logging into Kindle is bad enough. It doesn’t read your book library well. It doesn’t use VoiceOver; it uses built in text to speech. This makes doing anything other than reading for pleasure almost impossible.

Hi,
As my subject line above states, Kindle on the Mac is not accessible. It lets you login, and browse your library, but once you open a book, it will not be read with voiceover.
I have attempted to talk to Amazon accessibility about this multiple times, and every time, they act like they don’t know what I’m talking about.

In my view, there is absolutely no reason for this, especially since they clearly know how to make accessible apps, which is demonstrated by the accessibility of the version of the app that’s available for iOS and iPadOS.
As stated above, Kindle for PC is also good.
In terms of selecting text, even though it may be somewhat inconvenient, you could read your books on a PC, and select the text that way, then have it sync to your other devices.
That may actually be easiest, because you use the same commands that you would anywhere else in windows.
Sorry for the lengthy comment, but I’m hoping this helps somebody.