Accessibility

Thorium Reader is for everyone, including people who are blind or have other types of visual, cognitive or motor disabilities. The application is compatible with accessible technologies like screen readers, including JAWS, NVDA, Narrator and VoiceOver. It includes a read-aloud feature with visual highlighting. Thorium Reader can be used with the mouse or the keyboard, and keyboard shortcuts are configurable. The display can be customized to meet the needs of users, including colors, text size, spacing, font and layout.

Accessibility information

Currently Thorium displays in the Book information panel under the heading Description the content of the accessibility summary metadata (accessibilitySummary). Attention ! Work is underway to develop a guide for displaying accessibility information. We are following this work and will implement the recommendations soon. Attention ! Accessibility information must be filled in by the editors. Thorium displays this information as it was defined. In case of doubt or complaint, please contact the distributor or the publisher of the file.

Native accessibility functions

Attention ! The native accessibility features offered by Thorium are strongly affected by the quality of the read files. Visual adjustments The application allows you to change the color themes and change the display font, text size. it is possible to use all the fonts installed on the computer. It is possible to increase the size of an image with Shift+clic on the image. Repeat several times to enlarge the image to the desired size.

Reading with a screen reader

When launching Thorium, if a screen reader is detected, the relative functions are activated. Note that screen readers use a separate buffer to access the HTML content which results in the visual scroll / page offset to be out of sync. In other words, Thorium is generally not aware of the user’s current reading location inside the screen reader buffer, unless the screen reader user triggers standard web API events (such as mouse click anywhere in the text, or keyboard tab into focusable HTML elements).

Tests and approach

EDRLab has a close relationship with the DAISY Consortium. Thanks to the people with visual impairments who participate in our design and testing, Thorium Reader aims to be one of the most accessible reading applications on the market. Thorium Reader is tested on epubtest.org. Version 1.8 received the following scores: Basic functions 86.67% (Thorium does not allow yet annotating a document) Non-visual reading 100% Mathematics 100% Extended descriptions 100%. The list of tests is as follows: