[real-eyes] Amazon "Sort Of" Makes the New Kindle Accessible
- From: "Luis Guerra" <free_speech@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <free_speech@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:45:52 -0400
Hi all,
I'm reposting this article written by Alena Roberts for the Matilda Ziegler
magazine in which she reviews the new Amazon Kindle.
Feature Writer Alena Roberts - Amazon "Sort Of" Makes the New Kindle
Accessible
Posted by Matilda on August 9, 2010; This entry is filed under
View all posts in Feature Writer Alena Roberts.
People who are blind or have other reading disabilities currently only have
access to 5% of published work, so you would think that we would be excited
that e-books are becoming so popular. Sadly though, there is still no e-book
reader, not even the newest version of the kindle, that is fully accessible.
It is my philosophy that my blindness should not cause me to have to buy
specialized equipment that costs me more money than I have. Rather, I should
be
able to buy the same products that everyone else does because accessibility
and usability are built in. I wanted to believe that when Amazon announced
that this summer's newest version of the Kindle would be accessible to the
blind, that they would actually mean it. I am sad to report, though, that
this
is not the case. Thanks to a lawsuit from the NFB and ACB, the menus of the
Kindle have text to speech (TTS) built in, but this appears to be the only
change that has been made.
According to a blog post from Buddy Brannen, "Voice Guide lets you navigate
your Kindle with spoken menus, selectable items, and descriptions. For
example,
when you open a book, Kindle speaks your current location and how far you've
read. Presently we don't have the features like enabling the voice guide and
TTS features without sighted assistance, navigate or read by smaller
increments in text to speech, voice guide or text to speech work in the Web
browser,
or enabling text to speech for the books which have text to speech option
disabled." As you can see, the changes that were made do not meet the
criteria
of a device that is usable by the blind. We can't even turn the TTS on
without sighted assistance. Also, thanks to Amazon allowing the publishers
to shut
off TTS in any book they want, we have no way to know if the TTS feature is
available until after we've paid for the book.
There are multiple reasons why I think the blind community needs to let
Amazon know about our concerns. For one, the added accessibility may be
enough to
convince the FCC to allow colleges to offer Kindles to their students, even
when they're not really accessible. The blind and visually impaired have a
right to read every published work just like anyone else, and having full
access to a device like the Kindle would give us the access we need.
Finally,
companies like Amazon need to understand that we're not going to buy their
products until we can use them without assistance.
URL
http://tinyurl.com/2bw2mh4
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