Browser Based Reading

One of the top challenges readers with print disabilities have is loading books onto their Assistive Technology (AT) applications or devices. To this extent, Bookshare has invested heavily in the development and adoption of its web services API. These investments have resulted in greater ease of use for Bookshare members who use AT that integrates with our API. However, given recent technological advances, we believe that we can further simplify the user experience for many Bookshare members by enabling them to read books directly in their web browser. The technological advances that make this possible today are:

1. *Mobile web browsers on tablets and mobile phones:* Being able to read books on iPads and other mobile devices is one of the top requests by Bookshare users. To deliver on that market need, Bookshare partnered with Shinano and launched Read2Go. Read2Go has been a tremendous success and we would like to go further by delivering books via the browsers built into these mobile devices. This approach has various benefits, such as
   1. being able to offer free web apps that leverage TTS and screen reader technologies built directly into the mobile devices and not having to license third party TTS technologies, such as Acapela,
   2. being able to more easily deploy applications across multiple platforms, such as Android and iOS
   3. being able to more easily update those applications without going to long approval processes and not requiring users to download apps.
2. *The wide spread availability of broadband and wireless Internet connectivity*: Today broadband, Wi-Fi and 3G networks provide ubiquitous access to books in the cloud. Next generation cellular data networks based on 4G technology are starting to be deployed and will provide even faster download speeds.
3. *More robust integration of screen readers with web browsers*: Apple's VoiceOver screen reader technology and 3{^}rd^ party screen readers for the Windows platform, such as JAWS, NVDA (released in 2006) and Windows-Eyes, have continued to improve web accessibility for people with print disabilities. Apple has also created a mobile version of VoiceOver for iOS devices, which has been well received by the vision-impaired community. Google's Android operating system also includes a screen reader called TalkBalk. Apple's iOS and Google Android's operating system combined now comprise over two-thirds of the smartphone operating system market share. Finally, the introduction in late 2006 of the WAI-ARIA standard for accessibility in rich Internet applications has also been adopted by browsers and screen readers, for example both JAWS and Safari released support in 2010.
4. *HTML5*: HTML5 introduces various technologies that enable more robust reading experiences in the browser. First, there is support for offline storage and web apps, which means that users can download books to local storage when they have Internet connectivity and be able to read them offline. HTML5 also introduce support for MathML and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), the latter could be exported for printing as a tactile graphic. HTML5 reduces the need for Flash for rich interfaces, audio and video, which has created screen reader accessibility challenges in the past. Finally, HTML and browser technologies are going through a period of rapid innovation, which even though it has created some challenges for accessibility, are also introducing new APIs, such as the TTS APIs in Google's Chrome browser, which enable self-voicing applications and synchronized word-level highlighting, which is a feature needed by dyslexic users.

Online book retailers and others are already taking advantage of these technological advances and have are introducing browser based reading experiences, for example Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader and Google Book's Web Reader. We are also seeing some open source alternatives, such as the Bookworm ePub Reader, the Internet Archive's BookReader and Inventive Labs' Monocle.

As part of this proposal, Bookshare would like to provide a browser based reading experience for Bookshare users. Features we will consider including are:

• Support for personal computer browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome with JAWS and the VoiceOver screen readers.  Google Chrome support would include Google's new inexpensive Chromebooks targeted at educational institutions.
• Support for mobile browsers on iOS and Android with the VoiceOver and TalkBack screen readers.
• Support for various font sizes and high contrast font color and background color combinations.
• Support for fonts targeted at dyslexic users, such as Dyslexie.
• MathJax support for MathML to improve browser compatibility and more advanced accessibility features
• Offline storage and application usage support for browsers that have support for these technologies
• Integration with study tools, such as annotations, highlighting, dictionary lookup and teacher inserted quizzes and exercises. This is an area ripe for open source innovation, so we will open source our tools, take advantage of emerging standards, such as Open Annotation Collaboration, and look to integrate with other open source tools, such as Khan Academy's web-based exercises system.
• Integration with Poet Image Description database and tools

As part of our work we will evaluate the various open source and existing solution as a foundation to build on with a preference to open source solutions, which enable greater sustainability, broader impact and greater long-term returns.

Beyond ease of use, another benefit of a browser based experience will be that students with print disabilities will be able to go to any computer at home or public library and be able to easily access Bookshare books without needing to download the book to a specialized AT device or application.

See also: Check out to see how iOS users navigate web pages with VoiceOver:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=73608251&gid=2484780&trk=EML_anet_di_pst_ttle&ut=1ythfS4KVz7AY1