TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

PDF can be a nightmare for me and others with disabilities—but WebbIE’s free ‘Accessible PDF’ may help

By Robert Kingett

A Kindle review will appear in the near future from TeleRead’s newest contributor, Robert Kingett, a visually impaired 12th-grader in Florida. Below are his thoughts on PDF’s challenges for the disabled. His bio appears at the end of this post. Welcome, Robert! – D.R.

The sad truth is that many e-books are not very useful for the visually impaired.

I have come across numerous instances where I can’t even read a book, let alone navigate it. And here I’m supposed to study it for class!

Blah! All I can do is hunt, peck, and, yes, even beg in some cases for another format of the same book. PDFs can be like potluck. I’ll be lucky if I can even read one line.

Stay tuned, however. I’ll tell you about WebbIE’s free “Accessible PDF Reader”—which may help, at least with nonDRMed e-books. The developers describe WebbIE as “a Web browser for blind and visually impaired people.” A small screenshot appears below, and a larger one is at the end of this past.

What it’s like being me

I’ll be in 12th grade in high school this year, and I love books—just so I can read them with my eye condition, which is something called retinopathy, arising from a premature birth. I can see only in one eye; it has tunnel vision.

If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, make a C around your left eye, and cover the other eye completely. And presto, you’re me!

With this issue come smaller ones, also annoying. I can’t read a regular book unless my nose and it are meeting face to face, even with a magnifier. That’s why I live on the computer, or just get audio books.

Limited audiobook choices

However. I can’t find everything in print in audio. A good example would be the Darren Shan series. There is no audio version of that here in the United States, and I can’t get it through National Library Service for the Blind, so it kind of irks my tidy mind when someone says it’s the best book that I will ever read, if I can. I love how he puts the “if I can” part in there. Makes me feel so much better. It is as if I smelled a delicious candy bar but couldn’t buy it because the store wouldn’t take my money.

Hopes dashed: No vampire story, just gibberish

I looked for an eBook version of the Darren Shan series, and lots popped up like bunny rabbits.

I downloaded a copy from eBooks.com and opened it up with Adobe Reader. My screen reader, JAWS 9.0, a text-to-speech program that sounds like a robot to those who are not used to it, said blank when I first opened it up. I thought it was just the cover page. It was. With my nose pressed to the screen, I tried the next page where I could see some text.

So I pressed the down arrow, but instead of hearing “my name is Darren Shan, and I’m a vampire, all I heard was blank, blank, blank, blank. I also heard, “Unlabeled graphic =+36756? 4. Image.gif.”

Wow! I didn’t know that was there! This book was really getting good! I tried exporting it as a text file which you can do in Adobe Reader within the File menu, and I opened up the text file ready to dive into some spooky story. I tried pressing the down arrow, and heard nothing. All I heard was blank, blank, blank. I half expected my computer to say “nothing’s there. Ding bat. Stop pounding on me.” But it didn’t, and I did a search for a different novel.

Tangling with Adobe Reader

This one I could read, but not post to a text file so I can easily navigate it. I had to fight with Adobe to just make it read the table of contents. I kept pressing the down arrow, reading line by line, and not by paragraph like I could have done if I had it in a plain text version.

This soon grew so frustrating I just deleted the book altogether. Also, all the unlabeled images and all the weird graphics in the book were honestly giving me a headache. I didn’t like hearing image.567.gif, and untitleddarrenshanimage=67.gif. I vowed never to read e-books again!!

WebbIE to the rescue

I did read a e-book the next day, and it was the Darren Shan series. I did it with the help of WebbieIE’s “Accessible PDF” part of the accessible programs package. When I saw this on Google, I wanted to race outside in my underpants! Oh my god! Could this be my solution?

I downloaded it here and installed it.  Even my sweat was sweating when I fired up the program and tried to open a PDF with it. It worked! I saw text on the screen, but was it like my math paper? Did it have jumbled numbers or did it have actual words? I tried pressing the down arrow to hear the first line. It read it without any issues.

Easy to use

Accessible PDF is actually the simplest thing you can ever come across. It also works in high contrast; so if you, like me, want to have black text on white, shoot! If you want to have white text on black, shoot as well. Well, obviously not at me, but shoot all the same.

The program is actually simpler in terms of navigation than in Adobe Reader. All the menus are nicely laid out at the top of the window, and you can change the font size and color. It is, like my sister’s room, very clean and organized; and like my brain, it works all the time.

Don’t get me wrong. I have complaints about Accessible PDF, and it won’t make the whole PDF accessible—well, it will, but some part has to be done by the author.

Unfortunately many authors are so afraid that by opening PDF’s to accessibility, they also open them up to copyright issues. Well, no, duh, but that’s what courts and lawyers are for.

For example in accessible PDF, I don’t know why, but the Darren Shan’s books were not formatted right. I tried reading by paragraph but it skipped like twenty pages, and it went to ends of books in some cases.

So this is how I had to read this fast-paced book…

He ran to the
House
And found something
That resembled
A pee.

Imagine putting pauses every time there was a new paragraph. Gosh! Boring, right? I want to have a book be at least as interesting as my feet. I guess I shouldn’t complain; but then again I wouldn’t have to be reading like this if authors would make their e-books accessible in the first place.

I don’t know what Accessible PDF looks like since I have my whole computer in high contrast mode. This makes it easier to see what’s on the screen.

How Accessible PDF could be still better

Accessible PDF is great over-all, but in some ways it irks me.

No reflow function! In Adobe there is something called reflow, under view mode that makes the text wrap all the way to one side of the document. If it’s allowed to do it anyway. I have only come across like seven out of the 56 books I downloaded  which had this feature. It was great since I had a high magnification.

Another shortcoming is that you have to open a PDF file within the application. My dog and I are too lazy to do that.

Won’t convert images to text

That’s about all that’s wrong with this application except it won’t convert images to text. If an author of an e-book has provided Alt text descriptions to images, then it will just look like another paragraph, but if they don’t you wouldn’t even know it’s there. I guess this is a good thing, but still, I just wanted to toss that up in the air.

The application can even read documents from Web pages, but I have never gotten this feature to work at all. I had to fill up my hard drive with e-books.

It’s easy to navigate through the program with just the keyboard and the buttons and stuff are labeled and everything. I loved this thing so much I actually planned a wedding date for the two of us.

Should make blind people jump and scream in delight

This simple little program will make blind people jump and scream in delight no matter how careless the author is towards the blind and or disabled. It will make many little, old, and big girls and boys squeal like cheerleaders. It may even make things better on some sighted people as well.

This program still has some minor bugs and glitches, doesn’t have as many features as it could have, and is hard to find on the Web, but it sure did make me want to run with glee outside in my underpants. This will be the program that will break down the walls of bad PDF tagging, and open a door that I’m sure never occurred to the authors mind. It also would be a good marketing tool for authors as well if they want to get their e-books sold or distributed to a wide verity of people.

That being said, not all PDF’s will open, and that is due to the bad tagging in the documents. Gosh. Do we honestly have to fight so hard for equal access to books? I mean it’s kind of sad that a completely different program has to be made, distributed, and downloaded just so that blind people can read PDF’s. In my book that’s awfully pathetic.

Like a Life Saver, this program is sweet, good, and it’s long lasting. Will it be better in the near future? Will it be the main tool used for PDF’s in the future? Will I ever get married? Who knows, but checking out this program is definitely a start.

Screenshot One

This shot is of Accessible PDF Reader displaying a document with a normal font and contrast.

Screenshot Two

Here we see Accessible PDF showing a document with high contrast, yellow text on black, in a regular window.

Robert’s Bio

“My eye condition came from being born prematurely in the New York reign of this world. With that also came the added burden of cerebral palsy, known as CP. My grandmother and grandfather, who took care of me for most of my life, then heard about a school for the blind here in Florida called the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind. I have been going there for thirteen years, and my mind has been warped as a result!

“In my spare time I write stories. I am an aspiring author. One of the places where you can find and read and review my work even if you do not have an account is at Fiction press. I host a podcast called the 4 Yo information podcast. And I also do another podcast called the Accessibility in Mind Podcast. “