The company is rolling out several changes to their Kindle App

May 2, 2013 09:07 GMT  ·  By

Amazon has announced several new accessibility features for the Kindle reading app, which makes it easier for everyone to navigate their Kindle libraries, read and interact with their books.

The new features have been rolled out on Kindle for iOS, but additional platforms will be included later on, Amazon said in a statement.

“We’re excited to introduce these new features to our Kindle for iOS app, making it easier than ever for our blind and visually impaired customers to access the vast selection of over 1.8 million books in the Kindle Store on their iPhone or iPad,” said Dorothy Nicholls, vice president, Amazon Kindle.

She continues by saying that they’re also trying to make customer-favorite features, such as X-Ray, End Actions, sharing, highlighting and bookmarking more accessible.

The new accessibility features enable blind and visually impaired customers to have over 1.8 million titles read aloud to them. Out of the sum, over 300,000 are exclusive to the Kindle Store and most of them cost less than $10 (€7.6).

The app can also read character-by-character, word-by word, line-by-line or continuously. Adding and deleting notes, bookmarks and highlights are much easier now.

The reading experience can be customized by changing the font, text size and background color, as well as the size of the margin and screen brightness.

So far, the updated Kindle app has received positive feedback from early users.

For the most part, people that have sight problems are saying that the enhancements are very helpful and work great. However, such reviews are sure to vary from user to user.

So far, the update affects the iOS app, but also Kindle for PC, the program that lets users read ebooks on their Windows PCs.

More platforms are sure to be added soon. Regular Kindle apps are available for smartphones that run Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.