James Nuttall Blog

Kindle Fire HDX Impressions

I have had some success helping people with dyslexia and the iPad. The Kindle Fire is the second most popular tablet on the market. So I figured that I needed to become competent about the Kindle Fire. So the other day I took the leap and purchased one from Amazon. My first impressions are favorable.

-- Set up is easy. 

-- Almost all Kindle books can be read aloud using the TTS.

-- The TTS is the Ivona voice which is very clear and gives an excellent read aloud experience.

-- The voice can be set a different speeds. The 1.0 is generally good. Skilled readers might prefer the 1.5 speed. It is unfortunate that there is no 1.25 speed.

-- The build in keyboard comes with word completion, next word prediction, or swipe input. The keyboard is very accurate.

-- There is also Dictation. The dictation appears to be the same as in the DragonDictate App. So I believe the Dragon Dictate is the speech engine being used.

-- The Amazon Silk browser is provided for the Kindle Fire. This browser is adequate. You can set the search engine to Google or Bing.

-- You can easily read webpages aloud using the @Voice Aloud Reader.

-- People wish that they could read Bookshare books on the Kindle fire. I have a Nexus 7 tablet. So I was able to transfer the Darwin Reader from the Nexus 7 to the Kindle fire. In this manner I was able to set up the Kindle fire to read Bookshare books.

-- On the Kindle fire the screen reader is not called talkback. It is called Screen Reader. This screen reader functions identically to talkback on android tablets. A totally blind person would have to have someone help them set up the Kindle fire when it is initially started. After the initial set up they should be able to run the Kindle fire without any problems.

-- All in all I'm enjoying my Kindle Fire HDX.