1163. Accessibility: NaturalReader Read Kindle Book

 What a wonderful product for enhancing life for visually impaired individuals. As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been helping an 85-year-old who can barely see. For years his life has been limited to things that he couldn't see. Tough when you want to work on a computer (search issues, read news, read books, look at pictures, etc. I have posted about Microsoft Magnifier (free) which now allows him to zoom in areas of his diaplay screen to see it. This was only step 1 of brightening his life. 

The text-speech product from NaturalReaders.com - NaturalReader -- is gold. Today we used it to read a Kindle eBook. There are two ways do do this (assuming you have already downloaded a book from Amazon OR borrowed for free from your local Library as it in Kindle Format and delivered by Amazon.

1. First read about NaturalReader at its site NaturalReaders.com. You may think it has to be purchased becasue it discusses mostly the Subscription Plans Plus, Premium. The different plans depend on the voices you want (See post 1161). That post tells you about the FREE voices (NOT a default) that can be used unlimited, versus the PLUS and PREMIUM voices which cut you off fter 5 minutes, number of characters/month, etc. So, use a FREE voice as instructed in post 1161. Even if you download the software instead of opting to use the website translation, your limits remain the same for text-to-speech! Also, you will have to pay for the software and again for upgrades. No need for this.

2. Now that NaturalReader is available (requires a FREE registration and login, get the Chrome or Edge Extension. Sorry if you use a different Browser. You want to use one of these two to allow you to use NaturalReader to read anything and everything loaded into Chrome. For example, any site can be read for you AND if you let browaser open the .PDF files you haveon you system it will be read. As a matter of fact, you can read most everything available to you outside the browser too, like a WORD document. You always have an option to go to NaturalReaders.com and then upload a file to have it read to you. But, I am limiting thsi post to Kindle eBooks only.

3. Optoin 1: Get the free Kindle App from Amazon -- check your App Store of preference and install on your PC. Open it and your Library will populate with books you obtained via Amazon and be displayed.  Click on the book of choice and scroll to where you want to begin (closing the book and restarting pickup where you left off). Now being test-to-read using keyboard chortcut Ctrl-T. Use thsi also to pause and begin again. Only other shortcut is Ctrl-W to close the book.

4. Iption 2 which I like better: Option 3 does not allow you to do modifications of voice, read speed, etc. when using it hat way. So, better is to open https://read.amazon.com/kindle-library. Up comes the Library with your books. Now like Options1, pick the desired book and open it.

5. Now it you PINNED the Naturalreader extension onto you browser (do so! how? manage extensions and PIN it works for Chrome) ian icon, large capital blue "N" will be on top tight. Click it to tell it to put the pop-up Player and settings manager up on the display. FIRST, change the voice by clicking on the circled voice and choose a FREE one (one of 3-4 at bottom of list...David is my favorite). compress/expand the size of the popup (arrows) will allow expansion that gives you access to settings where you can set the speee of narration. Play with the settings as desired. Only necessary ones to start is setting to FREE voice and speed. I found a whie ago that the Free voice selectionhad to be reset thsi time! So, remember to check it first. No problem though. If you get the tiemout, chenge it then to FREE one.

6. Now about the Kindle settings available. If you move mouse to top icons to monage the Kindle book itself appears. For example Aa allows changing text size. Play!  

PLAY is the key word. I am taking my notes re how I need to use both the Kindle browaer version AND the NaturalReader. I just want to alert my followers that thsi product is superb. Worth your time.

1161. Accessibility - Naturalreader text-to-speech and Microsoft Magnifier

 I have been helping an 86-year-old, visual impaired individual to take advantage of Accessibility features available to him. He had been visually impaired to the degree that he needs to both get a large display with highest resolution and then increase the size to 225% just to visualize the screen Icons and format. He was still unable to read most text.

First came Microsoft's Magnifier implementation that enabled him to magnifier his screen or just a lens over his screen to be able to read short text streams. He chose the Lens mode of the magnifier (Ctrl-Alt-L) since he could already visualize where things appeared on the overall screen. This allowed him to not only read within the lens but also input text without errors. Since his hands were constantly shaky, typing is almost impossible without duplicating letters or misspelling words. We tried the narrator function of Magnifier for a while, but it is very limited and not very consistent in what/where it reads.

Thus, we tried NaturalReader by NaturalReaders.com. Beautiful. You want to use either Chrome or Edge browser and get the Extension from their store to use NaturalReader withing the browser (ANY Website text) in addition to being able to load a file from your desktop or other folder to have that one red to you. You will question what is free or not, but simply put Natural Reader IS Free and unlimited if you chose the FREE voices given. The reader works in either Online mode (FREE or a subscription to get additional voices of function), or download a software version which also gives you access to Online but still limits your time in minutes and characters if you aren't using a FREE voice.

Here's the rub. It defaults to a voice that is part of the PLUS subscription. Thus, it will stop narrating at 5 minutes. Boo. To get around this, hit the Change button when the voice & play popup comes up and scroll to bottom of voices. All voices are designated by the subscription mode and FREE is specified for 3 voices at bottom. Now you will have unlimited access to whatever you want narrated. We are evaluating the functions in the FREE mode and have found everything we need.

What other functions did we pass up for now? One must remember that it is reading TEXT for its narration. Text withing an image is NOT TEXT by nature. If you want to read it you need to convert it to OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Thus, if you scan a document, e.g., you geta letter, bill, etc. in the mail and want help reading, you could scan it in and have it go through OCR software to "attempt" to convert all text correctly. OCR software is NOT perfect first off, but doe give you enough to correctly read a document despite some errors. Most likely, but haven't tried yet, NaturalReader knows this and can read and narrate correctly regardless. To use OCR with NaturalReader, you will need the Premium Subscription. (even if you have the NatyralReader software, plus, of course you will need OCR software. Brother printers/scanner come with the function and allow scan-to-OCR directly. Beware that not all OCR software is equivalent and you should find the best out there.

One other function we didn't play with yet and which I don't think is a necessity is the convert text to MP3 file. Maybe that would be beneficial should we want to hear the file some other time or to replay it in the future and didn't want to have to redo the text to speech work again.

Bottom line is NaturalReader is great. Unlike the Magnifier from Microsoft which uses its Narrator, it reads continuously without a hiccup, meaning wondering how to continue where you left off. The Free voices are the same to us! David in Plus is David FREE. I couldn't tell the difference. 

Now you can both see and read (narration. Increasing mouse pointer is helpful, but instead of increasing the size too much which will overlay text, CHANGE the COLOR. I found that my client had no problem finding it when green. He just then needed it enlarged minimally to see where the point was. I also use the magnifier now for the fine print text. AN I use the NaturalReader to narrate a Kindle eBook while work on something else. These changes to my client's life were invigorating. He again feels empowered and doesn't have to just sit around. Since he is so ambitious, he pursued genealogy using FamilySearch.org and succeeded in building his tree back to the 1600s where he uploaded over 500 pictures and attached them to individual persons. He also has written a story of his ancestors and self-published that. To transfer that onto his descendants, we put the story and photos out on Goole Drive (G:/MyDrive) which he could simply send to ANY email recipient to view. I have learned a lot in this progress and feel great that I could help. Sam, through me, has now become a seeing-eye and speaking dog, and would be proud of me.😀💕😁