Kindle Fails on Accessibility
With much fanfare a few months ago, Amazon.com rolled out its latest version of Kindle, the e-book appliance that they hoped would revolutionize the industry. At the time, close to the beginning of the school year, Amazon also announced that several “major” universities in the US would be “testing” the Kindle as a way of inexpensively delivering college text to college students.
In the meantime, Kindle has also been embroiled in a debate between consumers who have disabilities and the association that represents writers, The Authors’ Guild. Central in that debate was copyright issues and whether having a text to speech conversion tool built into Kindle’s operating system would be a violation of the copyright rules. More on that story.
But the Kindle story took a new twist when two of the “major universities” rejected the Kindle because – get this – “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”
Reported widely in the press, both Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have decided to say, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the Kindle.
E-Access Bulletin reports,
The institutions’ decision was “applauded” by the US National Federation of the Blind ( NFB: http://bit.ly/gBnAC ), which said that although the reader contains a text-to-speech feature, “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”, meaning that blind users cannot purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select which book to read, or even activate the device’s text-to-speech feature.
They further state,
“If e-books are accessible, then there will be no need for the expensive and time- consuming process of converting a printed textbook into Braille, audio, or electronic form. Blind students will have access to the same book at the same time and at the same price as their sighted peers”, said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the NFB.
Danielsen said that Amazon could increase the accessibility of the Kindle DX by “making the menus speak and/or by allowing the functions of the device to be controlled by keystrokes from the keyboard.”
