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I’ve reported about the Kindle more than a few times in this blog and have been generally fascinated by e-reader technology. I keep predicting it is the next big thing and with the pending announcement coming from the creatives in Cupertino, we may have another e-reader in the mix very soon.

That said, the e-reader, and specifically the Kindle by Amazon, has been having a rough time of it. First introduced in November of 2007, the Kindle was a big hit, selling out in the first five hours and on backorder for months after that. The Kindle 2, released two years later was equally well received and the DX version released a couple of months later was also very popular.

Then the fun began. A controversy with The Author’s Guild forced Amazon to hobble the Kindle 2 by shutting off the text-to-speech feature. Disability groups stormed the Manhattan offices of The Author’s Guild to protest and claim discrimination, but the device, it seems, was already inherently inaccessible to people with disabilities.

In May of 2009, Amazon announced a bold move of a offering the Kindles to several large US universities with the goal of taking over the college textbook industry and making paper college textbooks a thing of the past. More fun followed when the inherent inaccessibility of the device became widely known. A number of the  universities that piloted the program with the Kindle backtracked and dropped out when they started to see the accessibility problems. “Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also examined the utility of the Kindle DX as a teaching device and decided that they would not use the Kindle DX until it is accessible to blind individuals” – this according to the US Department of Justice (USDOJ).

The latest news on Kindle is a settlement with the USDOJ announced this week. It states:

Under the agreements reached today, the universities (Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Reed College, and Arizona State University) generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device.

This sounds pretty bad for Amazon and the Kindle.

And given Mr. Jobs recent efforts at making Apple products fully accessible, one can only imagine that the rumored “Apple Table device” WILL be fully accessible and perfectly timed to kick butt.

Stay tuned.

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.”

Read the full article on E-Access Bulletin.

I blogged a few days ago about a recent decision by Amazon to turn off the text-to-speech feature of the new Kindle 2 after The Authors Guild complained about licensing issues. The National Federation of the Blind are organizing a protest on April 7th at the Authors Guild in New York City.

More information about the protest can be found on their Facebook page

~j