A Small Tablet War: Reading (and a Few Other Things) on the iPad Mini and the Nexus 7

A Small Tablet War: Reading (and a Few Other Things) on the iPad Mini and the Nexus 7

Future Reflections Special Issue on Low Vision TECHNOLOGY
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A Small Tablet War: Reading (and a Few Other Things) on the iPad Mini and the Nexus 7
by Clara Van Gerven
From the Editor: Clara Van Gerven is a technology specialist at the International Braille and Technology Center (IBTC) at the National Federation of the Blind. The following article is based on a blog post on the NFB Access Technology Blog <https:/nfb.org/blog/about/blog> on low vision reading features on the Nexus 7 and the iPad Mini. It was posted on Friday, November 30, 2012 at <https://nfb.org/blog/atblog/low-vision-and-books-and-few-other-things-i…;. The information in this article has been fully re-tested, and the text has been revised accordingly.
There is nothing new about low vision readers using ebooks to their advantage. However, the quality of that experience and the devices with the best features change all the time. This article aims to give some insight into the current state of affairs. I will report on a little experiment I conducted with devices from two of the major players in the market--Apple and Google.
Books and Devices
Let me briefly bore you with the finer points of the devices I picked for this test and why I chose them. I tested on the iPad Mini (iOS 7.1, the current release on 3/31/14) and the Nexus 7, 2013 model (Android 4.4.2, KitKat, the current release on 3/31/14). I picked these two because they represent the two big players in the market, and because they are full-function tablets, but still small enough to fit into a smallish bag and a smallish budget. There are a million Android tablets out there, but only the Nexus devices run unmodified, as originally designed, up-to-date Android, hence my choice. Now, on to the main feature.
The book guinea pig of choice for this test was a set of Humble Bundle books <https://www.humblebundle.com>. Humble Bundle lets you buy games and books (in my case, books) at a price you pick (really!) and with a payout distribution you pick. That is to say, you get to decide how much of your money goes to the authors, to Humble Bundle, and to a short list of charities Humble Bundle supports. It's quite a nice system! More importantly, all of these ebooks are DRM-free, and they are available in multiple formats (usually MOBI, PDF and EPUB), so you can pick your device--it's as easy and flexible as you could hope for.
Buying ebooks in the company store is easy, but not always ideal. I purchased the books, and a download email was sent to me. The folks at Humble Bundle give excellent instructions, which I used as needed.
Uploading a Book
On the iPad Mini, I went to my download page and hit the button for Wil Wheaton's The Happiest Days of Our Lives in EPUB, my accessible and fully reflowable format of choice. Voilà, it asked me whether I wanted to read in iBooks or something else. The "Open in ..." option let me open the book in a plethora of ways--Nook, Reader, Voice Dream Reader, and Google Drive. Your options will depend on which reading apps you have installed. I chose to open in iBooks, as that is Apple's own reader. The book simply opened.
On the Nexus 7, I tried the same operation with Google Play Books. No luck. Then I went back to the actual instructions and read the ones for Android. I admit that I was discouraged by the length of the instructions and the fact that the first two options involved a computer. I decided to try Play Books, as this is the native option. This prompted me to ask myself a series of questions. Do I really need to read all these instructions? Why does my first option require me to use a computer? What if I'm not near one? What if I forgot my connection cable?
I skipped to the Android device option, which was easily the simplest for my purpose, my book, and my device. I read:
"Using your Android device
You can upload EPUB and PDF files from your Android device to Google Play Books. Before you can upload PDF files, you'll need to change your upload settings. Open the Google Play Books app > Touch the Google Play Books app Books icon > Settings > Check the box next to "Enable PDF uploading."
Download an EPUB or PDF file on your device. Select the downloaded file on your device notifications or Downloads menu. If prompted, select Upload to Play Books. Open the Google Play Books app. Go to My Library > Uploads to see your uploaded files."
I followed the steps and met with success. Here, too, non-Google options were offered for reading my book. I chose Google Play Books. While there are still a few more steps involved in getting these books onto Android as compared to iOS devices, I was delighted to find that Google has actually made vast improvements to this process since I last tested. First of all, you can now read EPUB in Google Play Books, and you are no longer forced to use a computer and an EPUB-friendly app to get EPUB books onto the device. The settings change needed to upload a book directly is a one-off change, and while it's odd to have to enable PDF uploads to upload an EPUB document, it works nicely enough.
Low Vision Features
The basic low vision functionality is similar in iBooks and Play Books--you can adjust font size, brightness, and color scheme (regular, sepia, and night, which means white on black). You can also choose a font. In addition, on both devices, double tap will open an illustration and let you zoom in on it individually. The glitch that used to make images disappear in night view on the Mini has been fixed. On the Nexus 7, you can also pick text alignment and line spacing in the settings. On the iPad Mini, you can choose a scrolling view instead of flipping pages.
Where it gets interesting is with the peripheral items--how easy is it to get to these controls? How easy is it to get into a book? On the face of it, the magnification gestures on both devices are similar--you can magnify while in a book, and pan through the page and controls when you reveal them. This is quite handy. The magnification on the Mini is crisper and clearer all around compared to the Nexus, though it has been cleaned up in KitKat and looks better than it did in the past. That said, the gestures on the Nexus are, I think, nicely intuitive, more so than on the Mini (for me, at least).
A Quick Comparison
Here's a very quick comparison:
Nexus
Start magnification: Triple tap, one finger
Change magnification: Pinch/reverse pinch
Pan: Drag two fingers
Temporarily magnify: Triple tap and hold (revert to previous state when finger is lifted)
iPad Mini
Start magnification: Triple tap, three fingers
Change magnification: Triple tap three fingers, then drag up or down
Pan: Drag with three fingers
The change magnification gesture on the Mini proved especially challenging to me. There are some more quirks once you stray away from books even a little. For one thing the magnification is, for lack of a better term, more persistent on the Mini. The Nexus switches you back to regular view every time you change apps or screen orientation, which is irksome if you need the magnification consistently. Obviously, on triple tap, the magnification restarts.
Large text, another useful feature, is quite different on each device. iOS gives you more size options, but only works in Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Messages, Notes, and certain aspects of Maps. The large text in Android KitKat gives you only one option for size, but applies it more broadly to things such as the settings screen, which is quite nice. Icon names remain tiny in either case. That said, iOS gives a low vision user a few more options than Android does--you can bold the text (requires a restart), turn on button shapes to make buttons more findable (if also lower contrast). You can up the contrast in a number of ways--you can reduce the transparency that is so troublesome in iOS 7, or darken colors and reduce the white point for those sensitive to glare. One other feature that currently has no Android counterpart is inverting colors, which can be done on iOS and which works well. There are ongoing rumors of improvements for the next release of Android, so we're on alert for that.
All in all, I have to say that book reading on either device, purely from an in-book perspective, is pretty similar, with a slight advantage to the Mini. It is with the other, peripheral, and related tasks where the iPad Mini shines and perhaps--perhaps!--merits the price difference. The magnification is a bit better, but it is the consistency of the magnification that really makes the difference. If you want it to stay on, it will stay on, and if you want to turn it off, that's easy, too. What's more, if you're one of the many people who will use speech for reading books occasionally (but not all the time), turning it on and off is much easier on the Mini. On the Nexus, turning off speech requires the user to change the accessibility settings. On the iPad Mini, you can set triple tap Home either to toggle VoiceOver or prompt you to choose whether you want Zoom, VoiceOver, or both.
There are, of course, other reading options on both Android and iOS devices. I have not covered these here, though some have good low vision and/or speech functionality, simply because there are so many. Furthermore, Apple iBooks and Google Play Books on their respective devices are the default option and ideally integrate the best with the rest of the tablet's functions.
In short, the Nexus 7 is a little like duct tape--it's cheap and mostly functional. The iPad Mini, on the other hand, is more like one of those fancy rabbit-shaped bottle openers--well designed and a little overpriced. It does its job very elegantly, but sometimes it's a little baffling.

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