Nan, it would indeed be wonderful if someone from Amazon is monitoring this group. Overall, I think the nature of the comments on this list is quite positive. Taken as an aggregate, they would certainly convey to Amazon something of the utility and importance of the accessible portions of the Kindle.
You and I see the issue of suggesting improvements to text to speech somewhat differently. I don't think improvements would necessarily involve significantly higher cost to Amazon. Enhancements to the way the Nuance speech engine parses text and speaks it could be managed by simply using the mark-up language already present in the engine's code. This might take some time, but it would certainly not involve an overhauling of the software.
You are absolutely right when you say that complaining will place us in the cranks department. However, a certain amount of level-headed complaining is inevitable and even useful. For instance, if it weren't for the users on this forum, I would have not been able to tell Kindle Support that at least four users I know of, presumably all from different parts of the country and probably using different computers, are unable to open the latest version of Kindle for PC with Accessible Plugin.
Finally, Nan, if it weren't for your efforts, we wouldn't have this forum. Thank you for setting it up and for your helpful posts on it.
Craig On 7/24/2012 8:46 PM, (Nan Hawthorne <hawthorne%nanhawthorne.com>) wrote:
I was telling my husband a couple weeks ago about our/your request for someone to join this group. he said it is highly likely there is someone here, but they would not identify themselves. It might be one of those people from Reputation.com who keeps track of what people are saying about a company or product. Or even more likely it is someone from the Amazon marketing department who follows several sites or groups. I suggest that if you have something you want to see in a Kindle you should suggest it, describe it thoroughly, say how you think it would boost Kindle's sales and if you can supply numbers of likely people to use a feature, so much the better. If we complain instead of offering useful and practical solutions, we will be filed away with the cranks. One thing I would drop as a complaint is the text to speech.. you can count on it Amazon contracts out for that and are not going to be willing to break an existing contract or contract for a higher priced tts later on. We know what we want, but we also have to think "why would a company do this?" Altruism is the religious institutions' job, not corporations.
