you don't want a paper-white, it has no speaker and I don't think has speech. The kindle fires do and Amazon has been making leaps and bounds over the past year or two in accessibility. I love my Kindle fire and it is very easy to use the kindle app. There's a couple little tricks.
1. when you buy a book, make sure it says text to speech. enabled (most do on Amazon.)
2. complete the tutorial for using the tablet so you have things down.
You can use the navigation drawer as it is called in the Kindle to zip about with the table of contents so you'll be good on that one.
3. when you open the book that has text to speech. double-tap the screen and the menus will come up. In the very bottom right there is a start text to speech button and you can double-tap it to make the kindle read to you. It is to the right of the change text to speech speed button which you touch repeatedly with double-taps to get the speed you want, I listen at 3x speed.
4. The Kindle will continue to read to you with voiceview until it gets to the end of the book or you give the tablet more commands. This can also be making the ttablet change orientation such as to landscape. To prevent this from happening. Hit the button to make it lock before doing anything else with it and sit back and enjoy. You can usually get about 24 hours of straight speech reading from it, or possibly slightly more before it needs a recharge, though of course using the silk internet browser or running other programs or keeping it unlocked will drain it faster. When it is locked however, it will not give you a low battery warning. But you can use it while charging and it charges in an hour or so.
if the fire still isn't your thing, a kindle keyboard is pretty good. They don't make them anymore but you could probably get one dirt cheap and they also have text-to-speech accessibility and a speaker, though the speech isn't as good as it is on the tablet. Also because of a change in how Amazon does deliveries of e-books ot the kindle. You'll have to hook it up to a computer via a cable to import books rather than being able to remotely download them via wifi. The thing also doesn't have accessible internet and you'll need a friend to help you set it up but it'll work great after that if you are willing to work with the problems it has.
The Fire is generally what I've found works best.