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.

The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m. The coalition includes the blind, people with dyslexia, people with learning or processing issues, seniors losing vision, people with spinal cord injuries, people recovering from strokes, and many others for whom the addition of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 promised for the first time easy, mainstream access to over 245,000 books. Read the whole news release on the Maine Cite website

The Reading Rights Coalition have also started their own website

~j

Image from Creative Commons license