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Great Reading Apps for Booklovers Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired

From: Visually Impaired: Now What?
Categories: Book Review , Helpful Products , Reading
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Editor’s Note: This blog post has been updated to include additional information about reading apps. Check out “Reading Apps for Booklovers Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired” for more information. Books flying into a tablet

Electronic Access to Books Has Changed

Tablet computers, like the iPad, Kindle Fire, and Samsung Galaxy, have dramatically changed how we read. For individuals experiencing any type of vision loss, these devices have also increased the overall ease of access to print. The digital formatting of print into electronic text allows for enlarging text by changing font size or through screen magnification and using screen reading software like Apple’s VoiceOver or Android’s TalkBack to read text out loud with a synthesized voice. In addition, since these devices connect quickly to the Internet, they may also function as audio receivers, streaming newspaper reading services and audio recordings of books, magazines, and podcasts in a way that now provides unprecedented access to a vast array of content to readers of all abilities. There are many great apps to use for reading on a tablet, and a comprehensive list would be much larger than the apps outlined here. Many are free, so once you get comfortable using a tablet for reading, you will likely want to experiment more. I hope this list will offer a good starting point.

Reading Apps

The apps highlighted here (in alphabetical order) include: AIRS-LA, BARD Mobile, NFB NEWSLINE®, and Voice Dream Reader. Nearly all of the apps run on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) and Android devices (which include the Amazon Kindle Fire). To date, NFB-NEWSLINE does not run on Android devices, but that will no doubt change. With the exception of Voice Dream Reader, all are free. Voice Dream Reader is $9.99, which in the world of apps is moderately priced, but if you’re a reader with low vision, it will be the best $10 you’ll spend in a while!

AIRS-LA

AIRS-LA is the app for the Audio Information Reading Service of Los Angeles. Readers do not have to be from the Los Angeles area to use the app or website. A brief signup is required, and the service is designed to provide a wide range of audio content to users who are blind or visually impaired. Several features of this app and the content provided include:
  • A wide range of material, including current national newspapers and magazines, lectures, and podcasts.
  • The ability to download or stream the content at no charge.
  • Most of the content is read by a human reader, as opposed to synthesized screen reading.
Both the app and website for AIRS-LA have an easy-to-navigate menu. You can make selections by media categories, such as “Lectures,” “Periodicals,” or “Vision,” followed by a sub-menu of titles and available dates, or articles. For example, under “Periodicals,” readers will find, among other titles, “Business Week,” “Good Housekeeping,” and “Forbes” magazines with a list of available articles or editions. One limitation this user has discovered is that due to the availability of volunteer readers for AIRS-LA, some periodicals may be limited on the edition or article availability. For example, a check in January 2017 revealed that Atlantic, Oprah, and Consumer Reports, among many others, were up to date, but Business Week was several months behind. Nonetheless, there is enough content available on AIRS-LA to keep a voracious reader very satisfied.

BARD Mobile

BARD is a service of the National Library Service (NLS) Talking Book program. The acronym BARD stands for Braille and Audio Reading Download. The BARD website allows users of the free lending service to download books and magazines directly from the Library of Congress website. The BARD Mobile app has made this process much simpler and even more portable, because reading material can be downloaded directly to the app. When the book is open, it is read using an interface that looks and works much like the Talking Book player that many of us are already accustomed to using. If you’re not familiar with the Talking Book program, check their website for an application and eligibility requirements or call toll free 800-424-8567. As a member of the Talking Books program, you can register to download books from BARD with a computer or the BARD Mobile app on either an Android or iOS device. To register for BARD online go to the BARD application instructions and the BARD Mobile Application User Guide. The first time the you open the BARD Mobile app, you will be prompted for the registration ID and passcode sent to you by email shortly after completing the online registration. Once the BARD Mobile app is open, selecting “Get Books” will let you search through the NLS Talking Books collection of books and magazines and download items directly to your device. You may have a book or magazine within a few minutes! These are the same digital audio books and magazines with human narration you get in the mail if you use the Talking Book player. One of the great bonuses of downloading books and magazines to your mobile device is that you don’t need to return them – they can stay on your device as long as you want them and have room to store them! The downloaded book and magazine files are rather large, so to make space for your next books, you will want to delete those you are no longer using.

NFB-NEWSLINE®

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has offered a newspaper reading service, called NFB-NEWSLINE®, for years via the telephone. No smartphone required! At its most basic level, users simply place a call to a toll free, or local number, and use the telephone keypad to listen to articles read from their local newspaper. For users with a computer, however, there are many more advanced options for newspaper content delivery through the NFB website, so users can customize the way they read the newspaper or use the service. The NFB-NEWSLINE app allows iOS users to download content directly to an iOS device. To download newspapers on the NFB-NEWSLINE app, you will first need to be a subscriber to NFB-NEWSLINE. To subscribe, call 410-659-9314 or go to NFB-NEWSLINE®. The subscriber user ID and passcode ID are used only the first time you log in with the NFB-NEWSLINE app. Just like the reading service by telephone, the app provides access to hundreds of newspapers, local TV listings, and several magazines. The advantage of the app is the ability to move from newspaper sections and articles more quickly and to customize what is read with VoiceOver or Zoom screen magnifier. Low vision users who wish to read the articles using Zoom without VoiceOver will notice that there is no way to change the font size or style, and that the text does not wrap within the screen when magnified; therefore, there may be a lot of right to left panning required to read the magnified text.

Voice Dream Reader

Voice Dream Reader has been available for several years from the App Store for iOS and more recently released for Android devices. Voice Dream Reader will open a wide variety of book formats and files, including the DAISY files from Bookshare, E-Pub, Word, PDF, and Web pages. If you have a subscription to Bookshare already, just enter your username and password the first time you wish to add a book from Bookshare. After that, you can download books and magazines from Bookshare directly through Voice Dream Reader. If you don’t have a subscription to Bookshare yet, go to the Bookshare website for more information about membership. Bookshare works well with VoiceOver on iOS and TalkBack with Android and is fully accessible, but in this low vision user’s opinion, it is for the print reader with low vision that Voice Dream Reader is such a gem. Some of these features include:
  • Text automatically wraps to eliminate scrolling left to right.
  • Wide variety of text options are available, such as font type, spacing between lines, background and text colors, and font size up to 90.
  • Text-to-speech reading with word highlighting independent of VoiceOver with additional voices available.
  • Text highlighting, context sensitive notes, and bookmarks.
  • Imports Web pages, PDFs, and Word documents.
The list goes on! Using Voice Dream Reader is very much like reading print books years ago, in the comfort of an easy chair. On the tablet or phone the technology permits you to highlight text, look up words in the dictionary, and even jot a note into the text—as easy as writing a comment in the margin of a text, way back when!

Putting Reading Back in the Hands of Readers Who Are Visually Impaired

ipad with hand indicating apps on screen For many years, this writer felt estranged from my love of books and reading. There are many tools now to resume reading, and these apps will get accessible reading content back into the hands of readers with vision impairments. In fact, with any one of these apps you may find yourself with a lengthy list of books you “have to get to.” If you have all, you may actually discover you can read as much – or more – than you ever did. Regardless of your vision! Did you find my list of reading apps helpful? Are you currently using any of them? If so which ones and why? Would you recommend one of the above reading apps to a blind or visually impaired friend? Share your thoughts and comments about your choice of reading apps in the section below.

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