http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions1-8/
Adobe® Digital Editions 1.8 preview is an update to the popular Digital Editions electronic book reader that adds support for accessibility. It is designed to work with Windows and Mac operating system accessibility features, including high contrast, and voice reading software – JAWS on Windows and VoiceOver on Mac.
This preview enables assistive technology users to read protected eBooks, including books offered via Overdrive through many public libraries and books purchased through online book sellers such as Barnes and Noble. Digital Editions 1.8 is not a full replacement for Digital Editions 1.7. Currently, the Digital Editions 1.8 preview does not support 1.7 features for annotations, printing, and device support (the ability to load eBooks to USB-connected eReader hardware). The focus of this release is to add accessibility support. Future releases will incorporate more of the Digital Editions 1.7 features as well as maintain accessibility improvements introduced in Digital Editions 1.8.
EVALUATION
Works great with the keyboard. You need to use Space and CTRL-Space to move forward and backwards by page. It’s easy to tab between panels. The “book content” is in a separate pane with that title.
Has lots of features to adjust for size, but I find nothing for contrast or changing screen colors.
It is not possible to read continuously with JAWS or NVDA and a friend reports it doesn’t work well with WindowEyes. But for me it was very responsive and more accessible than Blio or Kindle for PC.
I downloaded several books from our local libraries for free and could navigate the table of contents, go to specific pages and easily read.
It’s possible it might work with TextAloud and someone should try.
Without a screen reader, I mean. It does not need the JAWS virtual cursor; I turned that off and it still worked with JAWS. That means there might be actual text that can be pasted to the clipboard for TextAloud to grab.
For me, it was great to jump around and read a page here and there.Wonderful for doing homework or researching a topic. Not so wonderful for reading a novel or that 100 pages an instructor just assigned.
For example, I downloaded “Cleaning Windows XP For Dummies”. It took literally thirty seconds, and I was in the table of contents. I found a section on eliminating duplicate DLL files and started reading it. That was faster than searching google. (I already had an Adobe ID which speeded things up considerably.)
But then I tried reading a mystery and that wasn’t nearly so fun. I had to keep pressing Space to go to the next page. Not relaxing. The text does show up on my Braille display fine however.
