December 03rd, 2018

 APPS FOR ACCESSING BOOKS
 
By: Carmen Willings
teachingvisuallyimpaired.com

Below you will find resources for accessing electronic texts as well as a list of apps that provide access to electronic texts in an accessible format. 

 

 

Free The Audible an Amazon Smart Phone app, that works on the iPhone and Android devices, provides instant access to its entire store of audio books and podcasts recorded and narrated by actors.


Free. The BARD Mobile app is a service of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS). It provides access to braille and talking books directly from the NLS Braille and Audio Reading Download (BARD). It contains nearly 50,000 (and growing) books, magazines and music scores in audio and braille formats. Connect your Bluetooth ready device and instantly access braille materials. In order to use the app, you must be registered with a braille and talking-book library in the NLS network of cooperating libraries. 


Free Download books fro Amazon.com with the Kindle app. Reading options include large print, computer generated speech and human narrators.


Free Learning Ally provides access to a library of ore than 65,000 audiobooks is considered the best source for K-12 and college-level textbooks. Users can download and play on all iOS devices. ​Learning Ally is a national nonprofit provider of books in accessible format for people who cannot read standard print due to visual, perceptual or physical disabilities. Provides thousands of titles available on digitally recorded audio books, DC, and computer disk, including textbooks.


$19.99 Read2Go, by Bookshare is the most accessible DAISY ebook reader for iOS. From within Read2Go you can browse, search, download, and read books directly from Bookshare using your Bookshare membership, as well as read DAISY books from other sources. ​Bookshare provides access to books that are legally scanned for people who are visually impaired or print disabled. The books can be read with adaptive technology or in embossed braille.


​$14.99 Voice Dream Reader is an accessible reading tool with advanced text-to-speech and a highly configurable screen layout that can be tailored to auditory readers and visual readers. Voice Dream Reader supports reading PDF and Word documents, DRM-free EPUB and DAISY eBooks, Web pages and more. It's directly integrated with Bookshare, Dropbox, G-Drive, Evernote, Pocket, Instapaper, and Gutenberg. 


$4.99 The only ePub book reader for the iPhone, iPad and iPod that reads out loud. vBookz has a magnifying glass interface indicating your current reading location, the magnifying glass follows the text as the book is being read, making the reading experience much more enjoyable and fun.


Free. vBookz PDF Voice Reader. This version of the ePub book reader for the iPhone, iPad and iPod reads out loud as the basic vBookz app, but this app can also read pdf files!


$19.99 ​ZoomReader lets you magnify and read text by first taking a picture of an object like a book or menu, then converting the image into text using state of the art Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. ZoomReader will then read the text back to you using a natural sounding voice.