Reading problems

Finished reading La carte et le mémoire  (Michel Houellebecq) and Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino) - around 600 pages over 3 weeks, in office shuttle, cafés. Had sore eyes as a result. This month was exceptionally hectic even at work with a huge volume of translations and tight deadlines.


I find I move between reading and non-reading phases all the time. As continuous reading always results in sore eyes and/or discomfort, i really avoid reading. And then when it has been too long (say a month or two), I pick up again a book and try to finish it.

I'm still not used to text-to-speech. It sounds too odd and kills any pleasure whatsoever of reading. Audio books are alright, but the experience is completely different. Perhaps reading is irreplaceable. Text-to-speech fails with fiction and complex non-fiction books.

As a possible solution, I'm thinking of buying a compatible refreshable braille display. My reading speed is better with braille and it would not involve any reading stress. But braille displays are very expensive currently, between $2500 - $8000. Several projects for developing an affordable refreshable Braille display are going on. Once in the market, the retail price will be around $300 for these displays (For e.g., Quixote, by Bristol Braille). These new displays are expected to be available by the end of 2012. I will wait for few months.

Do you use a refreshable Braille display for reading? Any suggestions?

Kindle's Inaccessibility

I purchased a Kindle 3 a year ago. So far, the accessibility feature has been mostly adequate for me. Although text-to-speech and type face options depend on the publishers, which I find a huge issue. I always need to "try a sample" to ensure that I can "read" it!

After talking to some other people with low vision, I realised that Kindle still does not offer font option for page menu navigation. The Voice guide option (Menu - Settings - Page 2 first option) can help but it is not very reactive. By the time it reads out the contents, I am already squinting to find my way through on my own.

Still, I feel that e-ink does not strain my eyes if I read in enough light. When I purchased Kindle I could read easily in font size 5, now I rather choose font size 6. There are two more bigger font sizes that I can still choose.




I do not use text-to-speech option a lot, because the text-to-speech technology used in Kindle is still very basic. There is no pause between sentences which most of the times becomes very confusing.

Reading books

Thanks to Kindle, I could again read in 2009 after a 5 year disturbing hiatus. My reading speed is still limited and I finish a book in 2 weeks rather than 2 days but I can READ.Yet, it remains a completely different experience.

For me, reading has never been an isolated activity. I have always associated a book with the external material circumstances linked with reading - the cover of the book, how I got the book (hours of rummaging through a library or a specific bookstore or gifted by a friend), outside weather, and my disposition as a reader at a given time and stage in my life.

Now, with a Kindle, there is no cover, no physical "form", no old pages, no more hunting through libraries (just search title on amazon and download with one click),

I sometimes grieve for the loss of material aspect of the book. Earlier, when I read paper books, each one had a separate physical identity with a different jacket, size, weight, each having a different odour and procuring a "physical" life of its own in my bookshelf (Samuel Beckett's "Molloy, Malone Dies, Unnamable" soaked in rain and then dried in sun, some pages of Othello's Arden edition smeared with my pink skin allergy...). It was not easy carrying Musil's The Man Without Qualities".

Now, on a Kindle everything is black and white, and customisable - font, spacing, pagination. To my annoyance, some books no longer retain their original author-intended page format and space appropriation vis-a-vis the written text. Where would we fit some of the works of Perec here, all the ambivalence between subjective and objective space?

Yet, I cannot complain. At least, an e-reader like Kindle allows me to "read" again despite low vision. And I shouldn't complain about physical form so much because I cannot read print anyways :P

I sometimes use text-to-speech option on Kindle for non-fiction books when I want to read in bus or in public. Partly to avoid reading in a moving bus or to avoid other people peaking into the page contents or sometimes to avoid a situation when strangers tell me that I shouldn't hold a book so close to my eyes. The narrator in Kindle's text-to-speech utility often ends up skipping essential pauses leading to misinterpretation and confusion. In comparison ZoomText narrator is much advanced. Although, I still find narrator or audio books too intrusive for a solitary activity (reading).

I am also these days a bit annoyed with my brain processing everything wrongly due to limited visual picture that it receives. I misread a lot without knowing that I'm misreading.

How do you manage prolonged reading with low vision? Do you have better solutions?