Hi Jim, On Apr 5, 2011, at 03:05, James Nuttall wrote:
> Is there any was to turn pages or mark your spot so Stanza or Kobo > will start reading where you left off? > > Sent from Jim's iPod Touch If you're trying to mark pages in Stanza and Kobo, I assume that you have these ebook reader apps successfully configured. If not, I'll describe the configuration for Kobo with numbered instructions in the next paragraph. (I'll cc this to the macvisionaries list, since this is a long post that is more easily found in the secondary Mail Archive, which is not available for the viphone list.) Two different answers, one for each eReader: you can turn pages, mark your spot with a bookmark, navigate by Chapters using the Table of Contents of a Book and run a "Find Icon" search to navigate to a page which matches your search in Stanza. In Kobo, if you have set up your book to use a "Page Transition Style" of "Scrolling" in the "Settings" menu, you can navigate to different pages within a chapter with a three finger flick up or down to scroll forwards of backwards, and if you exit the current book by double tapping the center of the screen to bring up page controls, and then double tap the "Library" button in the top left corner of the screen to return to your Library, a bookmark will be placed at your current page location. Both these apps read through continuously by chapters. At the end or beginning of each chapter with Kobo, provided you use the "Scrolling" page transition style, there will be link images that let you navigate to the next or previous chapter. Double tapping the link images at the top right and bottom right of the page advance you to the start of the next chapter. Double tapping the link images at the top left and bottom left of the page take you to somewhere in the middle of the last page of the previous chapter. You can also navigate using a table of contents, which is accessed with an "Icon tock" button (pronounced this way -- actually the last word is TOC, the acronym for "Table of Contents") that shows up when you double tap the center of the page to bring up page controls. (If you're on the first or last page of a chapter, make sure that focus is not on one of the link-images before you double tap -- touch the center of the screen first). Then you can access this "Icon tock" button either by flicking left twice from the first control on the page (the "Library" button in the top left corner of the screen) or flicking left from or touching the button immediately to the left of the "Icon Gear" button in the top right corner of the screen. (I haven't updated to the latest OS yet, so I usually do a four finger flick up to get to the first element of the screen -- this is now a four finger tap on the top half of the screen -- and then flick right twice, and double tap.) If you haven't set up "Scrolling" mode which is necessary for accessible Kobo ebook navigation, here's the way to do it: 1) If you're reading a book, double tap the center of the screen to bring up page controls 2) Touch the "Icon Gear" button in the top right corner of the screen and double tap. (You can flick right to it from the "Library" button at the top left corner, but you should be able to locate this by touch, just below the "Battery Power" announcement on the status bar at the top right of the screen). 3) Double tap the "Icon Gear" button in the top right corner of the screen to bring up the other configuration icons in the bottom half of the screen. 4) Move your finger down along the right side of the screen from the "Icon Gear" button in the top right corner of the screen. As you approach the bottom of the screen you should hear "increase brightness, button", and then "Toggle Night Reading Mode, button" at the bottom right corner of the screen. 5) Double tap the "Toggle Night Reading Mode, button" in the bottom right corner of the screen. Note: do not try to flick to this position. There are problems both with the screen updating correctly, and the fact that this button is now one of three buttons that are all labeled as "Toggle Night Reading Mode". This introduced labeling error arises from a sloppy code update and has persisted as an unfixed problem for over 6 months! The button actually gives you access to settings for page presentation style, page transition style, font type, and text alignment, and is the only way that you can access the "Page Transition Style" category to set this to "Scrolling" mode -- which is what you need to navigate books in the Kobo app accessibly. There is no other way to get to these settings except by using the incorrectly labeled button. You cannot set this in the main Settings menu of the iPod Touch for the Kobo app, for example. 6) Flick down to the "Scrolling" button under the second category of "Page Transition Style" to select this by double tapping. 7) Double tap the "Back" button in the top left corner of the screen to return to the book page. 8) Page controls will still be up. To dismiss them, touch the center of the screen then double tap. You're now back in the middle of the book and can just do a two finger flick down (or VO-B with a keyboard) to continue reading. Going back to Stanza, you can also read through entire chapters with a read all gesture (e.g., a two finger flick up or down, depending on whether you want to start from the beginning or the present position -- you can also use VO-A and VO-B as keyboard commands from a paired keyboard). The one disconcerting thing about Stanza is that the screen doesn't update to display the current page as VoiceOver reads. It reads to the end of a chapter, and then stops. This is true of both Kobo and Stanza (continuous reading takes place by chapter.) You double tap in the center of the screen to bring up page controls, and you'll also be able to get an indicator of your current position in the center of the screen, which might announce something like "Chapter 2 Page 1/18 5% Into Book". However, you can set bookmarks and navigate to specific sections. (You cannot set different bookmarks in Kobo, and there is no search facility supported in that app. Also, page controls no longer -- for many months -- announces the page location in the book in a central info control. You'll have to set up "Scrolling" page transition style if you want such information announced.) One easy way to handle this position in Stanza is simply to read by whole chapters. When you get to the end of a chapter, double tap the center of the screen to bring up page controls. Then, if you want to advance to the start of Chapter 3, you can double tap the "Bookmarks Icon" in the bottom left corner of the screen, and navigate the "Table of Contents" (the default view) to Chapter 3 and double tap to select. Your screen's current page will update to the first page of Chapter 3. On some ebooks (especially public domain ones from Project Gutenberg), you won't get convenient "Table of Contents" navigation. So the other way to advance to the next chapter, or an arbitrary page, is by toggling VoiceOver off (triple click "Home" button), tapping the right side of the screen the number of pages you want to advance (e.g., if your currently displayed screen page as announced in the center of the screen when you brought up page controls by double tapping the center of the screen is "Chapter 2 Page 1/18", and you've just completed the chapter, toggle VoiceOver off and tap the right side of the screen 18 times to advance to the first page of Chapter 3.) If you want to stop in the middle of a chapter or bookmark such a location, the easiest way to do this is by searching for a phrase of text that you just read. With page controls brought up, flick right three times from the "Bookmarks Icon" button at the bottom left corner of the screen to the "Find Icon" button (4th of 5 buttons along the bottom of the screen) and double tap. On the "Search Book" screen, flick right to the search field, double tap, and type in a few terms from the last phrase you heard VoiceOver read. You'll get a list of resulting matches throughout the book, so as long you typed in enough to uniquely the location, you can go directly to that page. Even if you haven't you'll hear brief context phrases for each of the matches in the list of results below the search field. Stanza's search facility was supported very early on, and is really fast -- much faster than in iBooks, which added this capability months later than Stanza. Depending on the source of your ebook, Chapter location information will also appear for each matched listing for your "Find" action at the end of the context phrase in the list of matches, which will be ordered in page sequence from the beginning to the end of the book. (Incidentally, this is one of the ways in which selecting a good source for you eBook, even if these are free epub books in the public domain, can make a difference. A good distributor, such as epubBooks at: http://www.epubbooks.com/ will use high production values that supports chapter navigation and generally error free text rendition. You experience may not be the same with an arbitrary download of the same book from Project Gutenberg, where there may be no table of contents organization and higher error rates. (The epubBooks products are DRM free and consist of titles that are either in the public domain or whose authors have consented to distributing them this way.) Double tapping on a search result will take to you to the page where the match occurs (and the page on the screen updates to this location). Once you have forced the underlying page on the screen to update to the result of your search, Stanza should return you to this page once you leave it. (This means that reading will begin at the start of the page, somewhere before the passage you searched for. If you are in landscape mode, the start of the page may correspond to where it would be if your book were displayed in portrait mode -- and that starting point can be before the start of the page that would be announced if you touch the top of the page in landscape mode.) You can also then bring up page controls and set a bookmark for this location. Double tap the "Bookmarks Icon" button in the bottom left corner, but now when the screen shows "Table of Contents", double tap the "Bookmarks" button (2nd of 3, and just above the "Home" button at the bottom of the screen) to change to the list of bookmarks. Flick right to the "Add" button in the top left corner to bookmark the page that is currently displayed in Stanza. You can assign this a name by editing, or accept the default name (which will be something like "33.22% into Book") and then double tap the "Save" button in the top right corner of the screen to save the bookmark. Bookmarks are separate from the last viewed page, which should be remembered when you come back to the book after exiting it (whether or not you set a bookmark.) Exit the Bookmarks page just as you would leave the "Table of Contents" tab under "Bookmarks" without making a new selection -- by double tapping the "Read" button in the tap left corner of the screen to return to reading the text. Note that if you do not use the search feature to force the screen to update to a particular location you will always get the first page of the current chapter you are reading as the saved bookmark if you try to bookmark your location (unless you started reading the current chapter from a previously saved bookmark or search.) What gets saved as the bookmark is always the current page displayed on the screen, and since VoiceOver does not update the screen while reading, this is usually the first page of a chapter. Similarly, if you have advanced your reading in the app by using the search function, the page you update to on the screen is the one that Stanza will return you to as the "remembered position". You can change the currently displayed screen page either by 1) navigating in the "Table of Contents" (the view shown by choosing the first of three buttons at the bottom of the screen when you select the "Bookmarks Icon" button in the bottom left corner of the screen after bringing up "Page Controls" -- this is the view that comes up by default with the "Bookmarks Icon" button selection), or 2) navigating your list of stored "Bookmarks" (the second of three button options when you select the "Bookmarks Icon" button after bringing up "Page Controls"), or 3) by doing a search by double tapping the "Find Icon" (flick right 3 times from the "Bookmarks Icon" to the 4th of 5 buttons at the bottom of your screen when "Page Controls" are up, and double tap) and then double tapping on one of the listed text matches to your search. As to why Stanza doesn't update the screen when VoiceOver reads, I think it's a question of memory resources and performance tradeoffs. When the iPad was first released a year ago, I listened to some podcasts that said Stanza was accessible. (These podcasts were done by low-vision users). When I tried this myself on an iPad, I couldn't make Stanza read continuously to the end of the chapter. (This was always the problem -- early on, Stanza "almost worked" with VoiceOver, but it would only read the current page, and not update.) Then what I discovered was that the performance I got with Stanza depended on things like how long the chapter was, and how much memory I was using with other applications. (Remember, the iPad did not get the update to the full multi-tasking environment until Fall 2010, and at the time of its release, which pre-dated the iPhone 4, iOS 4 with support for running multiple apps at the same time was still months away from arriving on the iPhone and iPod Touch.) So while Stanza would read with VoiceOver (and update the screen) on the sample Alice in Wonderland book, it would poop out and not complete the chapter in other books with longer chapters (and stop updating the underlying page before it reached the end of the chapter). With other books, screens would be successfully updated if I had more memory at my disposal or the chapters were short. (For example, if I booted up from scratch or did a hard reset, and checked that there was a lot of free available memory I would get better results. If I tried to stream You Tube videos, do lots of Safari browsing without cleaning out the cache or removing tabs, or did other things to take up lots of the free memory then I could make Stanza page updating fail.) A later version of Stanza improved over-all accessibility, snappy performance, and gave super-fast searches, but at the expense of not trying to update the underlying screen as you read. This is just my hypothesis, however. It has always been extremely easy to upload ebooks directly into the Stanza app (without having to sync the device through iTunes, although that's also possible). I'm sorry to say that the latest versions of Kobo have introduced another accessibility problem for new users: by default the display mode for books in your library is set to "Shelf View", which only reads out the current book your are reading. If you previously used Kobo and set the app up for "List View", you can continue to access your complete library, because your earlier preference settings are remembered when you update, but the only control to switch from "Shelf View" to "List View" is not exposed to VoiceOver. This is an issue for new users and for users who have to reinstall the app from scratch. I managed to direct Annie off-list to the location of the control, so she could regain access to the rest of her library, but it's a painful process if you don't have access to sighted assistance. (It's trivial if you do -- the control in the top right corner of the screen simply isn't exposed to VoiceOver.) This is why the reply to your question took a while to get to (it got pre-empted by the off-list exchanges to restore access to the list view of the library.) HTH. Cheers, Esther -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
