PDF version of this manual.
This Easy Reader was inspired by the accessibility work carried out by the ACIAH association for its ACIAH-Linux distribution, following the reading of this article: Digital inclusion: the “Heart” button that aims to replace complex keyboard shortcuts on Linux computers.
It was developed based on ACIAH’s scripts, with the help of the following artificial intelligence tools: ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini, and Grok.
The purpose of Easy Reader is to allow blind or visually impaired users to have documents read aloud by the computer instead of having to read them themselves.
To do this, the user navigates through the Caja file manager and, when they want to know the contents of a document, they simply press either the F8 or F7 key.
The computer then determines the type of document and, depending on the format, converts it into a text file, which is then read aloud using a keyboard-controlled audio player.
When the F8 key is pressed, the resulting text file is saved alongside the original file. This file is not saved when the F7 key is pressed.
A configuration file listing the supported file extensions for saving, named emmabuntus_easy_reader.json, is located in the user’s ~/.config/emmabuntus_easy_reader/ directory.
This file can be edited. In particular, you can remove certain lines to disable saving the converted file for specific file types.
Currently, Easy Reader supports documents in the following formats:
TXT, ODT, PDF, HTML, DOC, DOCX, and RTF: these are converted into text files so that they can be read immediately by Easy Text Reader.
EPUB documents, on the other hand, are read directly using Ebook-speaker.
Image files are also supported. After being analyzed using OCR, they are converted into text if textual information is detected, and opened in Easy Player TTS to read the text aloud.
Audio and video files are played directly using VLC.
Archive files are extracted into a folder located at the same level as the archive. For ZIP files containing a DAISY document, the document is opened directly in the DAISY player.
Easy Player TTS uses the following keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the document:
- Space: Play / Pause
- Escape: Stop playback. Preferably use this key to stop playback immediately.
- Up Arrow: Increase playback speed
- Down Arrow: Decrease playback speed
- Equal key: Restore normal playback speed
- Left Arrow: Go to the previous sentence
- Right Arrow: Go to the next sentence
- Ctrl + Left Arrow: Go to the beginning of the document
- Ctrl + Right Arrow: Go to the end of the document
- P: Enable / Disable punctuation
- V: Select the voice
- T : Switch theme: automatic, light, dark
- O: Open a file
- F1: Display voice-guided help
- Ctrl + Q or F4: Quit
Note: When reading with Easy Player TTS, when speech playback is resumed for the first time, Orca may pronounce the word “space” when using the Pico Svox or Piper speech synthesizers. This is normal and is caused by Orca’s default configuration, in which key echo is enabled for the Space key, which is used to start playback with Easy Player TTS.
If this bothers you, you can disable this key echo in Orca’s preferences, under the “Echo” tab.