National Federation of the Blind Commends Schools
for Demanding Accessibility for Blind Students</p>
<p>Baltimore, Maryland (November 11, 2009): The National Federation of the Blind, the oldest and largest organization of blind Americans, today applauded the decision of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University to not deploy Amazons Kindle DX as a means of distributing electronic textbooks (e-books) to their students. The Kindle DX features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud. The menus of the device are not accessible to the blind, however, making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazons Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX. Both universities have experimented with the Kindle DX to learn whether e-book technology is useful to their students. But the schools will not adopt the device for general use unless and until it is made accessible to blind students.
<p>I don’t understand why they’re going on about the Kindle being inaccessible to the blind. For the 99% of people who have to use traditional books who aren’t blind, e-books makes sense to reduce the weight, the space books take up, and importantly, the cost. For the < 1% who happen to be blind, they’re not reading the traditional books anyway so where’s the loss? </p>
<p>It sounds as if they’re just looking for excuses to not use e-books and keep selling traditional expensive books made out of crushed trees.</p>
<p>uc^2 dad, maybe it’s using leverage when it’s most likely to work. Better to say “we can’t buy this until it includes accessibility” instead of “they’re great, we’re buying them, and by the way, could you pretty please add accessibility?”</p>
<p>I don’t have a Kindle and don’t know how end users annotate e-books, but it would be fantastic if there could be some sort of partnership arrangment with Amazon and organizations like Recording For The Blind. Not so much for plain texts but for descriptions of graphs and illustrations, which can’t be automated by the read-aloud Kindle algorithm.</p>
<p>So why don’t colleges say that we won’t buy any textbooks unless a brail version is offered? </p>
<p>I have the less expensive kindle and one of the things I like most about it is that I can change the size of the test. For some limited vision students, this would be a benefit in and of itself.</p>
<p>Because of those few blind students (not that it wouldn’t be great if Kindle could also be used by them too), it’s better for us to cut down more trees, for our kids to have a back problem from carrying those heavy books. Sometimes we try to be too PC and end up losing the sight of what’s for the greater good. D2 just got the newest Kindle. She loves it. We used to have a whole carry on just for her books because she’s such a fast reader. Next week when we go on a trip she’ll just have her Kindle with her.</p>
<p>Most of my reading assignments are uploaded online by my professors and I end up printing them all anyway because reading that much off a screen gives me a headache and really strains my vision worse than paper copies do. I’d rather carry a book.</p>
<p>TKiss, it’s a LOT easier to read a Kindle than a computer screen. Much different technology.</p>
<p>Additional things that are being lost sight of here (bad pun intended), are that it’s cheaper to buy the Kindle version of a book than the print version, there are disabled kids for whom carrying around a lot of heavy textbooks is next to impossible, and most Kindle books do offer the ability to hear them out loud. So, while the blind may not be able to access that little gizmo easily, a blind student could ask a fellow student to hit the button for him/her and listen. Now, he has to have someone sit there and read the textbook to him/her.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the DX has it, but Kindle 2 has a text to speech function. Problem solved. Perhaps any necessary graphics could be supplied separately in braille.</p>
<p>^^Not motivated to read the article (but feel qualified to comment anyway :p): How about a piece of velcro on the button? It’s only a matter of time before Amazon comes out with a DX2 that would solve the problem, anyway.</p>
<p>It just smacks too much of trying to protect the book revenue stream for the authors (many of whom are college profs), publishers, bookstores, etc. It’s not logicial to disqualify something simply because it doesn’t directly serve the needs of <1% of the users, especially when that <1% is already being served in some way through braille, audio books, or readers. </p>
<p>And realistically, it wouldn’t be that difficult for the Kindle to have some software written for it that enables a blind person to navigate the menus to call up a book. The bigger issue might be the authors/publishers themselves since they’ve been balking at the idea of a device automatically converting text to speech but some of them tend to still have the antiquated crushed trees mentality as they’re scrambling to justify the cost of their product with the current capabilities of technology.</p>
<p>The problem is that only the book text can be read out load, not the menus to get to said text.</p>
<p>Most blind students use etext, which is time-consuming, inconvenient, and expensive in many cases, and an accessible Kindle would greatly speed things up. But there’s no point in providing it if the students can’t actually access the books!</p>
<p>I’m surprised to see such bigoted attitudes on this board</p>
<p>Again, it’d be a fairly simple matter to develop a menu system that a blind person could use since the Kindle and other eBooks already have the capability to ‘speak’. Hopefully they’ll do this soon. But in the meantime, there’s no good reason for the other 99% to not start using it or something like it.</p>
<p>It was fairly stupid of Amazon not to incorporate the necessary features into Kindle to make it fully accessible to blind customers.</p>
<p>I mean, where was their marketing department? Asleep? Blind and visually impaired people are an obvious market for a device with a text-to-speech function. Why not go after that market?</p>
<p>Wow. Glad most of you will never have to deal with trying to access things that are currently unaccessible. I’ve got a blind child… so I understand the focus of the article and the effort being made here. To those of you who are perfectly comfortable leaving out this segment of the population (who by the way are not ■■■■■■■■ or mentally incapable just because they can’t see), bless you, it must be so nice not to have to deal with imperfections. Kind of like having a building of important classrooms but no handicapped ramps are provided… because after all, those people in wheelchairs can just ask someone to carry them up the steps.</p>
<p>Kindle should have been working to make their future generation accessible to the blind, something that has been lobbied for unsuccessfully so far.</p>
<p>This seems like a lack of common sense. Without the Kindle, how were blind students to access the books in the first place? Couldn’t they keep on accessing them how they would have anyway and let the students who can use a Kindle use one?</p>
<p>I see a lot of university podcasts on iTunes. Is that discriminatory because deaf students can’t benefit from them?</p>
<p>Zimmer, I understand that you’re emotionally involved. And, none of us is unsympathetic. </p>
<p>Some of us might be willing to join you if the argument being made was that ALL textbooks must be made available in braille versions or audio versions. But to say that the publishers of print textbooks don’t have to do this, but the makers of e-book readers do is just plain silly. To say that every other kid has to pay about 40% more for textbooks to buy textbooks which are every bit as inaccessible to the blind doesn’t benefit the blind–it just hurts other students. It’s not like Amazon’s only product is the kindle. It’s not like Barnes & Noble, which is introducing it’s own ereader, doesn’t sell printed textbooks too. One heck of a lot of the college book stores in the US are run by Barnes & Noble. </p>
<p>And the blind community has its head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich if it does not realize this stance is pitting it against the physically disabled. Because your kid is blind you don’t care about the kids who are physically disabled and for whom carrying around 25 pounds worth of books is difficult. (Ever try to carry 25 pounds of books in a backpack on crutches? I’ll admit I haven’t, but when my kid had a broken foot in high school, she did. She’d come home crying from the pain. Her shoulders and upper arms ached. It didn’t help that she weighed about 105 pounds at the time. Trying to walk on crutches and use a back pack with wheels was impossible. There are kids who have to do that each and every day. The kindle would really help them. But, of course, that doesn’t matter to you. )</p>
<p>If that last sentence seems rude, well…that’s how your message comes across to me.</p>