Thanks to the efforts of Amazon and the developers of the popular NVDA open source screen reader, Kindle books are now accessible to blind people using a Windows 10, Windows 8, or Windows 7 computer. First download the Kindle app on your computer, and make sure you have the latest version of NVDA installed.
From Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Amazon.
Last year, we brought our VoiceView screen reader to Kindle E-readers. This week, I’m excited to announce our update to the Kindle for PC app, making it easier for visually impaired customers to find and read millions of Kindle books. Customers can now use the popular, open source NVDA screen reader to find and open Kindle books on a Windows PC.
Using NVDA, customers can read books by character, word, line, page, and continuously (with pages turning automatically). Customers can highlight text, add notes, perform dictionary and Wikipedia lookups, and copy text to the clipboard. Additionally, readers will experience improved discoverability of various book highlights and notes while reading—these types of annotations will now be spoken in the context of the story versus at the end via one list. NVDA users with an attached braille display can also enjoy Kindle books in braille. Additionally, whenever publishers provide “ALT text” descriptions of images in their books, Kindle for PC now supports them in the screen reader.
Customers can experience the new PC screen reader support today – first install the NVDA 2017.1 release, and then install the latest Kindle for PC app.
Over 6 million books already have screen reader support, with more being added all the time — to check on a specific book, go to its detail page on Amazon.com and look for the new “Screen Reader: Supported” designation next to other helpful information about the book like whether it supports Word Wise or Audible Narration.
Source.
