Ebook with TTS

[Tex2002ans]

Thanks for all this info everyone, this is great stuff!

Originally Posted by tomsem

Kindle is okay, but does not do the word highlighting at all, and doesn't support it in Scrolling mode. They want you to buy audiobooks and use immersion reading, which does these things (arguably it is a much better experience than TTS, but it shows what Amazon's priorities are).

No. Amazon was sued by the big publishers over completely idiotic "copyright" reasons. This is why TTS was removed from all Kindles.

In 2009, it was Text-to-Speech "infringing" on their audiobooks!

• Techdirt: "Amazon Gives In To Ridiculous Authors Guild Claim: Allows Authors To Block Text-To-Speech"
• New York Times: "Amazon Backs Off Text-to-Speech Feature in Kindle" by Brad Stone
• Ars Technica: "Amazon decides Kindle speech isn’t worth copyright fight"
• Techdirt: "Authors Guild Continues To Falsely Claim That Reading Aloud On A Kindle Violates Audio Rights"
• "Authors Guild Digs Itself In Deeper Concerning Kindle Text-To-Speech"

And in 2019, it was captions generated by Speech-to-Text "infringing" on their ebooks:

• Ars Technica: "Book publishers sue Audible to stop new speech-to-text feature"

Same exact thing is repeating again with Google's "Live Captions":

• 2011: Ars Technica: "Will copyright hamper IP closed captioning?"
• 2021: Ars Technica: "Chrome brings live-captioning to any web audio source"

But this time, it seems like those idiots will finally back off, since it's an Accessibility feature built directly into the entire OS/browser.

(And devices have gotten relatively powerful enough to auto-transcribe this stuff in real-time with a relatively high degree of accuracy.)

Originally Posted by tomsem

Kobo 'tries' to support it but it can't turn pages without going off track (I just tried it. In one case the page turned and SS just went away. In another, it turned page, started reading the middle of the next page, in a completely different voice.)

[...]

Screen Reading vs. Text-to-Speech

Screen Reading is an Accessibility feature. (TalkBack [on Android] + VoiceOver [on iOS])

It is meant to read out loud everything that's displayed on the screen:

• Buttons
• Menus
• Images
• Text
• [...]

Anything clickable/visible.

To see it in action, see the absolutely fantastic video/post from April 2022:

• Reddit.com: "This is how a blind person uses an iPhone"

Yes, most programs should definitely be supporting that better...

But Text-to-Speech is a completely different thing. It's meant to read Text on a page.

And, as a developer, TTS + Screen Reading require completely different workflows.

See:

• Developers.Android.com: "TextToSpeech"
• Android Develpers: "Adding accessibility features to apps for blind and visually-impaired users"

I'm surprised that Google Play Books acts relatively poorly in TalkBack.

Does Google Play Books not have a built-in TTS instead?

- - -

Side Note: What tends to happen is nearly all developers focus on getting the app/site to visibly work well for sighted users, while more obscure Accessibility features get shunted to the side.

There aren't enough people testing these "edge-cases", and even when they do, the people coding/implementing/testing aren't actually familiar with how features are actually used by the blind people who need it.

(See a similar problem I discussed in-depth about CSS's failed "Aural Stylesheets".)

- - -

What Programs/Apps Do Blind Readers Actually Use?

From what I can gather from:

• DAISY Consortium: "Ways People with Print Disabilities Read"
  
  • Especially 44 minutes in when she describes different devices/apps/programs for mobile/desktop.
    
  • Side Note: For even more info, see my recent posts here + and here.
    

many blind readers have been using:

• On Mobile
  
  • Voice Dream Reader
    
  • BARD
    
    • For audiobooks
  • (From what I can gather, iBooks is also very Accessible.)
    
• On Desktop
  
  • Thorium Reader
    
    • See their Github.
      
    • Note: This is made by Readium, the company that created the EPUB3 renderer that's used in most devices.
      
  • + all the actual Screen Readers, like JAWS + NVDA.
    

I don't know, I'm not an actual blind reader, but do read/write a lot about this stuff + like to keep Accessibility in mind.

[Quoth]

Screen Reading is an Accessibility feature. (TalkBack [on Android] + VoiceOver [on iOS])

Voiceview on later Kindles. Clue in the name.

Anyway, it's partly why on Android that installing/updating the Google Speech Engine and installing/updating Android Accessibility Suite isn't enough. You need an application that either automatically turns the page/scrolls screen when current portion is read (with an Accessibility option to turn that off), or an application that has a TTS control built-in and either has its own speech engine or uses whatever is installed on the OS.

But many of the OS systems (Talkback, Voice View, Orca Screen Reader, Win10 etc) seem badly designed.

[tomsem]

Thanks for this.

Note that TTS is still a staple in the Kindle app on Fire tablets for some reason. And of course Alexa (wherever you find 'her') is happy to read out most of your Kindle books. I have not seen anybody loudly complaining about this, even though these 'compete with audiobooks' in the same way that supposedly Kindles with TTS did.

Kindles do support TTS, in China, on a very limited basis: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=348449. It's not clear why they did this, given they are exiting the market there. It does not seem to portend broader support in other markets, but I would not mind if they turned on the switch for other markets.

I well understand the difference between TTS and screen readers, and there's not that much overlap between use cases. Speak Screen on iOS is the nearest equivalent to TTS, but it is (as the name implies) still an accessibility feature in the end. It's nice that Kindle app implements it in such a way that it support continuous reading, and I do use it occasionally.

Google Play Books does not have TTS. It doesn't surprise me that it doesn't have good TalkBack support. They are in the business of selling ads. Kindle app does support TalkBack well, or did the last time I tried it.

I like TTS enough that I got a PocketBook Era. It works very well, and I think the voices are Ivona (owned by Amazon).

[Spinningwoman]

I bought a Pocketbook Touch HD3 as a result of this thread and I am very pleased with it. I also realised that the Pocketbook app can be installed on Android e-readers like the Meebook 6 which also allows TTS of drm as well as not DRM epubs there, unlike the built in reader, so now I’m doubly well equipped. I love my bigger format Kobo Forma, so I do still have a hankering after the Era, but I really wanted my TTS-able e-reader to be travel sized.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Spinningwoman

I bought a Pocketbook Touch HD3 as a result of this thread and I am very pleased with it. I also realised that the Pocketbook app can be installed on Android e-readers like the Meebook 6 which also allows TTS of drm as well as not DRM epubs there, unlike the built in reader, so now I’m doubly well equipped.

That's fantastic. Thanks for the info.

[JSWolf]

Does the iOS Pocketbook Reader allow TTS with DRMed ePub?