Access to books is an extremely important topic for those of us in the blind community, and accessworld has devoted many articles over the years to this topic. This time, we take a look at the recently released nook app for the ios platform from barnes & noble. barnes & Noble is a bit late to the party when it comes to the accessibility of its eBook platforms, but it has definitely made an effort with the latest version, version 3.3, of the Nook app. Although the Nook tablet device remains inaccessible to those with vision loss, it is worth investigating the accessibility improvements in this app. This article provides a description of how to use the app with included information about the accessibility of the app’s various features and functions.
barnes & Noble’s Nook app works with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and is available for free on the Apple App Store. the app is a tool to access e-books purchased from barnes & the noble website or via the b&n bookstore app, which we’ll also cover briefly in this article.
You are reading: Can i read nook books on my iphone
welcome screen
When the app is first opened, a splash screen appears consisting of the app’s name and promotional text highlighting the app’s features. although that promotional text is not spoken by voiceover, it is not essential to move forward. The sole purpose of this screen is to link the app with your Nook account, allowing you to always have your entire Nook eBook collection at hand. You will only have to do this once as long as your account remains connected. the process consists of entering information, such as your country, and accepting the terms and conditions.
There are a couple of accessibility issues with this process. the first involves the checkbox to accept the terms and conditions. by checking or unchecking the checkbox, the voiceover reports the opposite of what is actually happening. however, when you simply use voiceover to read the state of the checkbox, it correctly reports its state. secondly, the combo box where you select your country is inaccessible, so the help of a sighted person may be needed. After the initial login process, the app offers a tutorial for using the app. the tutorial uses headings and bullet points while teaching the basics of using voiceover with the app. the tutorial is useful and well done, and the only minor issue is with the voiceover, as the bullets appear as separate elements, forcing you to swipe again to hear the corresponding text.
the library page
The library page could also be called the home page because that is where you would naturally start using the application. it lists all the books and magazines you’ve downloaded to the app, and you can simply double-tap a title to open a book. The Library also has a “Settings” button, a “Search” button to search through your book titles, and a “Sync” button to download new books or magazines purchased from Barnes & noble bookstore.
everything on the library page can be accessed with voiceover, except for a few minor details. there’s an unlabeled corner graphic near the top of the screen that the voiceover ignores, but that doesn’t affect the app’s usability. furthermore, although the voiceover correctly indicates when one of his books is a sample book, that indication disappears after he has opened the book and returned to the library. strangely, the prompt reappears if you open a different sample book and return to your library page.
The “search” button on the library page only searches the books and magazines in your collection and does not search for new books to buy. use the barnes and noble bookstore app to find and buy books, and we’ll talk about that app later in this article.
the screen when reading a book
while in a book, the order of items on the screen is as follows: book title, add bookmark (or remove bookmark if it already exists), return to library, table of contents/bookmarks/notes, options for text, brightness, search, information and page information. all these elements are accessible with voiceover.
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On the Index/Bookmarks/Notes page, there are three tabs across the top: Index, Bookmarks, and Annotations. each of these tabs has an accessible text field and a button to go directly to a particular page. in the index tab, list the chapters and/or subsections of the book. simply double-tap on one of them to go to that chapter or section of the book. in the bookmarks tab, it lists all your bookmarks. bookmarks also include page and contextual text. Lastly, the annotations tab lists all of your annotations (notes) throughout the book. they are listed, just like bookmarks, with the page number and the contextual text.
Selecting the “text options” button while reading a book takes you to a page to adjust various settings, but the page can be confusing. at the top of the screen are buttons for “size”, “subject”, “line spacing”, “margins”, “justification” and “rotation lock”. visually, the configuration options corresponding to each of those buttons also appear on the screen. however, with voiceover, you must first activate one of the buttons to access its corresponding setting, and then you can swipe to the right to access that setting. It can be confusing if you touch other areas of the screen instead of immediately swiping to the right because you may find settings that aren’t related to the button you’ve chosen. then it’s also hard to go back to your chosen settings because you have to explore by touch to find them instead of swiping to return to them.
The size setting allows you to choose from six different font sizes. sizes are extra-small (7 points), small (11 points), medium (16 points), medium-large (20 points), large (24 points), and extra-large (28 points).
reading a book
in general, barnes & Noble has done a good job of designing the reading experience in the Nook app with various navigation options available to voice-over users. the voiceover can continuously read a book with short pauses to indicate a page turn. you can also slide your finger down the screen to read line by line. In addition, the iPhone’s rotator gesture, used to jump from one element to another, allows reading by characters, words, lines or headings. you can also use a three-finger swipe left or right to move around the page or use the table of contents/bookmarks/notes pages to quickly navigate to those items in a book.
At the bottom of the screen, there is a navigation slider to quickly jump to multiple pages at once, but you can’t use voiceover to access that slider. however, the voiceover can read the icon at the bottom of the screen, which indicates the page number and the total number of pages in the book.
A powerful feature of the nook app is its search tool, which allows you to search for any text in a book or magazine. the “search” button at the top of the screen takes you to a new screen with a text field and the on-screen keyboard. enter your search string and deliver results by listing each search result along with its page number and contextual text. when a search result is selected, it goes to the chosen page with the text you searched for highlighted in yellow. however, the voiceover does not start reading from the text it has found. you have to navigate the page to find your search term.
the bookmarks tool also works fine. While reading, the voiceover does not indicate that a page has been bookmarked, but you can always tell if there is a bookmark on the page because the “add bookmark” button changes to “remove bookmark” when there is a bookmark in place. You can also go to the bookmarks tab on the table of contents page to find your bookmarks as mentioned earlier in this article.
other functions are also available when reading a book. if you double-tap and hold on a word, a window appears with four options: “add note”, “highlight”, “search” and “search”. choosing “add note” allows you to write a note which will then appear in the annotation tab on the content page. choosing “highlight” visually highlights the word you double-tapped. however, the highlight is only visual and the voiceover does not indicate that the highlight is there. double-tapping “search” brings up a window with the other occurrences of the highlighted word in other parts of the book along with the contextual text and page number. “search” displays the definition of the highlighted word. if you are searching for a word for the first time, it will take you to a screen asking you to download a dictionary in the language of your choice. however, the process of choosing a dictionary and downloading it is inaccessible and visual assistance may be required.
textbooks, pictures, perfect books and footnotes
For those of you who are students looking for a platform to read your textbooks, the bad news is that the nook app doesn’t support textbooks yet, regardless of whether you’re using voiceover or not. If the nook app does eventually support textbooks, it will be interesting to see if all the elements of a complicated textbook will be designed to support voiceover.
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Although the voiceover says the word “image” to indicate that it has found a photo or graphic image while reading, none of the books tested include descriptive tags for their images. barnes & Noble also sells what are called “perfect page” books with a layout that is designed to mirror the printed book, including all images. however, although the voiceover read the text in the “perfect page” books tested, it ignored the images entirely.
As for footnotes, they cannot be accessed while continuously reading, but can be accessed by tapping them at the bottom of the page. that sounds easy, but it can be difficult to find the footnote icon on the screen.
b&w bookstore application
although you can’t use the nook app to buy books, barnes & noble has another app called b&n bookstore, which is used to buy books. however, it has not been designed to support voiceover. accessibility issues are too numerous to detail in this space, but it’s safe to say that the bookstore app is a real train wreck. if the people at barnes & If you ever manage to make the library app accessible, there’s a feature we found interesting and potentially very useful. allows you to take a photo of a book with your ios device and buy the book immediately without having to search the catalog.
Although you can’t access the b&w bookstore app with voiceover, you can access the online book search and purchase process. We tested the process with voice over and safari on an iphone, as well as jaws and window eyes on a computer using internet explorer and firefox, and had no issues with the entire process. once a book is purchased online or through the b&n bookstore app, all you have to do is go to your corner app and activate the “sync” button on the library screen, and the book will appear on the library page.
accessibility for low vision
With its options to choose text size, font and theme along with brightness level control, the nook app does a good job of accommodating readers with low vision, especially those using the ipad with its largest screen. corner also works well with ios devices built-in zoom function, so you can make the text as big as you need.
for people with low vision who use voiceover, the latest versions of the ios operating system allow you to use voiceover and zoom at the same time. there is no cursor to follow along with the speech when reading continuously, but when navigating one of the rotor items, the entire line containing the item is bordered by the voiceover cursor. however, when navigating by line or words with the rotor during testing, the voiceover cursor bordering the line would sometimes disappear.
the end result
although barnes & noble definitely has a lot of work to do to improve accessibility and usability, nook app is definitely another effective tool that we can use to read books on our iphone, ipad or ipod touch. We’d like to see access to textbooks, as well as access to photos and other images with future releases, and we’d like to see improvements to the accessibility of the b&w bookstore app. of course we would also like barnes & noble to start addressing accessibility on your nook tablet device.
product information
barnes & noble nook app and b&w bookstore price: free available from: the apple app store on your iphone, ipad, or ipod touch
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