How to make Microsoft Narrator work with Kindle for PC

I am posting this because the information Amazon has is not correct or at least misleading and confusing. They have been alerted to the problem and may fix it in the future. (according to tech support, I just got off the phone with them)

For those who don't know, Kindle for PC is a free Kindle book reader and Microsoft Narrator is Microsoft's built in text to speech application. Working together you can make your Window's PC read your Kindle books to you !

The Problem: Amazon offers two different Kindle for PC apps one that reads Kindle books normally and one that is a plug in for text to speech ability - but they do not distinguish this by the file names, they use the same exact name for both.

If you go to Amazon to download the Kindle for PC app from the default link you get a file called KindleForPC-installer.exe and it is 36.3 megabytes.

That download page is here: www.amazon.com...

This will by itself NOT work with Microsoft Narrator. You need to download and install the version called, Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plug in (251 megabytes) - which is found at the bottom of This page here: www.amazon.com... under the section called, Reading on Kindle

You need BOTH of these programs installed for Narrator to work properly to read your Kindle books. Make sure you download each of these programs to a different location so Windows won't try to overwrite the file !!

Remember they use the same exact file name but are different applications. I suggest you RENAME them accordingly so you can find and or easily reinstall them in the future. The first app (36.3 mb's) is just the normal Kindle Reader itself so I renamed this to KindleReaderSetup.exe The second app (251 mb's) is the Kindle Accessibility Plug in which I renamed KindleAccessibilityPlugin.exe

First install the Kindle Reader and any books you want to read. ( Amazon has thousands of free kindle books you can download for free, most will have text to speech enabled for using Narrator)

Next install the Kindle Accessibility Plug in application. It will sync with the reader app and upgrade it to work with Narrator.

Lastly, open Narrator then open Kindle Reader. Open any Kindle book you have and hit Ctrl + R.

Now narrator will read the text of the book itself, not just the menu items !

Enjoy!

Great info, thank you.

Gotta love it when developers make it extra difficult to use their software properly.

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


This info is worth its weight in gold! Thank you, John. Had some problems... but I think I've got it, except that now the Narrator reads out every single piece of info. How can I get it just to read the Kindle book, without repeating all the keys/commands I use, while multitasking, etc.?

Maigret,

When you open Narrator look to the General settings tab and uncheck "Echo keyboard keystrokes while typing" . i think this will fix your problem. Feel free to play with other settings to fine tune it to your liking.

The only draw back to this is Narrator it seems will only read the text on the screen then you have to manually move the page down. This can get annoying so I make the text a lot smaller in the Kindle Reader and increase the amount of words per line. These are found under View and Show Display Options. Now Narrator will read for a while longer before you have to switch to another page.

It's sad you have to turn the page manually because they do have this functionality in the Android and Iphone versions of the software.
The devs could probable fix these limitations, I hope they do.

Even the built in Microsoft voice Zira sounds great with this as compared to others in the past. The voice doesn't get everything right of course but it's much better at pronouncing words and punctuating then it has in the past.

Thanx for providing the details to fix the error. if u still unable to solve the problem. Here are some guidelines to fix the error.
techfries.co...