Darwin Reader

Darwin Reader is an Android app for reading Bookshare e-books. So first let me briefly explain what Bookshare and print disabilities are. Bookshare is a digital library for individuals the print disabilities. A print disability means you cannot use regular printed materials for reading. Examples of print disabilities are blindness or dyslexia. Often people with print disabilities benefit from having the text read aloud to then. Bookshare provides e-books which can be read aloud on a computer or a digital device like a tablet or smart phone. Computers and digital devices have text-to-speech programs that can examine the text in an e-book and read this text aloud.

To read Bookshare e-books aloud the user needs a computer program or an app which uses text-to-speech to read the e-books aloud. Darwin Reader is an Android app the can download and read e-books from Bookshare. First in the upper right corner are three dots. Tap on the three dots will bring up a menu. One of the options is download a book. Tap on download. This will bring you to the Bookshare library. The search icon, a magnifying glass, allows you to search the library by author, title or subject. A list of books will appear. You can tap on any title to bring up a description of the book. If it is a book you would like to read tap on download. The e-book will be downloaded to your device.

Once downloaded the book appears in your library within the Darwin Reader. By tapping on a book title the book well be opened. You will see a arrow at the bottom of the page tapping this arrow starts reading. The best thing about Darwin Reader are the options you can choose for reading. Once again tap the three dots in the upper right corner. You will see settings. Tap settings. Inside settings you can adjust font size, font color, page background color, sentence highlight color and speed of the text-to-speech voice.

I particularly like the ability to customize the page and text colors. An example of my preferred colors is given below.  As you can see my main background color is dark green with light green text. These colors are very easy on my eyes. Additionally dyslexic individuals read better with different colored background than white and black text. My section color is blue and the reading highlight color is yellow. I especially like this highlight color since it makes the sentence standout. Unlike other readers that place a color overlay on the highlight text Darwin Reader actually changes the color of the text being read. This makes the sentence standout which means sentences are easy to track and you will not loose your place while reading. Dyslexic individuals often loose their place while reading.

Font sizes can also be adjusted. Sizes run all the way from small to humongous. I like the very large size print. Voice speed can also be adjusted from 1 to 11. I prefer 5. On many Android tablets you can download a variety of voices for reading aloud. On the Kindle Fire the voice is from Ivona. Ivona voice is very clear and easy to listen to. Darwin Reader can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. Price is $15. It is worth the price. I got the Darwin Reader on my Amazon Kindle Fire by purchasing Darwin Reader using my Android phone. Then I used APK Extractor to email the app to my Kindle Fire. In this way I legitimately paid for the app and could get it for my Kindle Fire. All-in-all I really love using Darwin Reader and can highly recommend it.

Love My Kindle Fire HDX

I’m loving my new Kindle Fire HDX. As a die-hard Apple fanboy, I thought that I would never find something to live up to my iPad. But the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX has really surprised me. Let me start off by saying what I use a tablet computer for. The major things I do on a tablet are to read books and news articles and to write.
The Kindle Fire HDX is great for reading. Amazon has over 2 million book to buy. I find the vast majority of books can be read aloud using the Kindle Fire HDX. I love the excellent quality of the text-to-speech voice. It is easy to read books aloud. You just go to your book and open the text features for the book. Text features allow you to change the text size or the background color of the page. You click on the ‘more settings’ and toggle text-to-speech on. You will only have to do this step once. When you go back to your book tap on the middle of the page. You will see an arrow. Tap the arrow and the voice will read the book. I find the best speeds for read aloud are voice speeds 1.0 or 1.5. I’ve contacted Amazon and recommended a 1.25 speed. Again I like the large selection of books and the ability to easily have them read aloud.
The Kindle Fire HDX can also read webpages and news articles aloud. There are some great free apps to do this. @Voice Aloud Reader can read webpages and news articles. Open the Silk browser to a webpage. At the bottom of the browser is a tab symbol with three lines on it. When you tap the tab symbol a menu will pop up. On the menu is the choice to ‘Share This Page’. After selecting to share a list will appear with @Voice Aloud Reader. When you tap this choice the text from the webpage will be loaded and read to you. A great feature is as the text is rad aloud, the text is highlighted. @Voice Aloud Reader can also read news articles from the popular news aggregator Zite. The app Google News & Weather lists news articles and has a build in text-to-speech reader.
Writing on the Kindle Fire HDX is a dream. The Kindle Fire HDX comes with a Swype keyboard and Nuance’s speech recognition build in. I especially like the ease of running your finger over the letters to make words. The Swype style keyboard is very accurate at guessing which words you are entering. In fact your swipes do not have to be that accurate or your spelling may be wrong and the program is very robust at figuring out what you mean. After you get use to it, I think it is about as fast as using a standard keyboard. It definitely beats pecking away at each letter. The keyboard also comes with great word prediction build in. When you swipe a list of possible words will appear. If the correct word is not presented first time around, then it is most likely in the list of alternatives. If you do type individual letters at a time, a list will predict what you are going to type. This list feature is most helpful to students with word production difficulties. Build into the keyboard is a microphone key. By pressing this key one can dictate instead of type. After dictating a sentence it is transcribed into text. This dictation uses Nuance’s Dragon Dictation. So dictation is very actuate. I use OfficeSuite Pro app to do all of my writing. The nice thing about this app is the word processing is very much like using MS Word on a PC. Files can be saved in Word format for easy exporting to other individuals or devices. All in all composing and writing on the Kindle Fire HDX is a breeze and satisfying.
Some people are concerned that the Kindle Fire HDX does not have access to all the Apps in the Google Play Store. I’ve found a way around this. I purchase my apps on my Android phone. Then using an app called APK Extractor I can email the app to my Kindle Fire HDX to be installed. In this manner I’ve legitimately paid for the apps and can have them on my Kindle Fire HDX. To install these apps on the Kindle Fire you go to settings > applications > toggle allow unknown apps to on. In this way I was able to get Darwin Reader on my Kindle Fire to read Bookshare books. I don’t use Darwin Reader on my phone; therefore, I transferred the app to my Kindle and then deleted it from my phone.
So to sum it up, I am enjoying my Kindle Fire HDX and highly recommend it to everyone.

Kindle Fire HDX First Impressions

Kindle HDX First Impressions

Kindle Fire HDX Impressions
I have had some success helping people with dyslexia and the iPad. The Kindle Fire is the second most popular tablet on the market. So I figured that I needed to become competent about the Kindle Fire. So the other day I took the leap and purchased one from Amazon. My first impressions are favorable.

— Set up is easy.

— Almost all Kindle books can be read aloud using the TTS.

— The TTS is the Ivona voice which is very clear and gives an excellent read aloud experience.

— The voice can be set a different speeds. The 1.0 is generally good. Skilled readers might prefer the 1.5 speed. It is unfortunate that there is no 1.25 speed.

— The build in keyboard comes with word completion, next word prediction, or swipe input. The keyboard is very accurate.

— There is also Dictation. The dictation appears to be the same as in the DragonDictate App. So I believe the Dragon Dictate is the speech engine being used.

— The Amazon Silk browser is provided for the Kindle Fire. This browser is adequate. You can set the search engine to Google or Bing.

— You can easily read webpages aloud using the @Voice Aloud Reader.

— People wish that they could read Bookshare books on the Kindle fire. I have a Nexus 7 tablet. So I was able to transfer the Darwin Reader from the Nexus 7 to the Kindle fire. In this manner I was able to set up the Kindle fire to read Bookshare books.

— On the Kindle fire the screen reader is not called talkback. It is called Screen Reader. This screen reader functions identically to talkback on android tablets. A totally blind person would have to have someone help them set up the Kindle fire when it is initially started. After the initial set up they should be able to run the Kindle fire without any problems.

— All in all I’m enjoying my Kindle Fire HDX.

James R Nuttall, PhD

James R. Nuttall, Ph.D.
(1946- , East Lansing MI)
Dr. Nuttall worked at the State of Michigan Department of Education for 30 years. He worked in a variety of roles within the Special Education Unit. Born two months premature in Denver, he developed an eye disease associated with prematurity, retrolental fibroplasia (RLF)*, which left him legally blind. While in school he had difficulties learning to read. “On a sixth grade reading test I could read only 27 words per minute,” he recalls. Most people assumed the problem was low vision. But as an adult, Dr. Nuttall visited the reading clinic at the University of Chicago and received a diagnosis of dyslexia. Dr. Nuttall received his Ph.D in psychology in 1981 from Michigan State University As a person with handicapping conditions, Dr. Nuttall has used a number of assistive technologies to learn, work, and play. In October of 2008, Dr. Nuttall was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). “This has given me the opportunity to try out a variety of new assistive devices. I love technology.” he says. Dr. Nuttall lives in East Lansing with his wife of 19 years, Linda, adult step-daughter Stephanie Goodwin, 5 year-old grandson Alex Joshua (AJ) and their pets, 10 cats and an Australian Shepherd named Mollie.
*now known as Retinapothy of prematurity (ROP)