Amazon Kindle DX is inaccessible for the blind, says advocacy group

Amazon Kindle DX sales are doing well all over the world; an eReader released keeping blind people in mind which is included with a text-to-speech technology that can read the text aloud to blind students and help them in reading through this device. Some people come forward and advice to make the Kindle DX available in universities for use as an electronic textbook replacing the textbooks. But the hard decisions taken by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University may slow down the Amazon Kindle DX sales.

Even the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) too supported the decisions and asks the readers not to use the Kindle DX as an electronic textbook. The reason behind the hard decision is that the Kindle’s menus are not user friendly and the blind people feel difficult in accessing them. Both the universities have decided not to buy any of the Kindle DX.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) reacted strongly and filed a suit against Arizona State University (ASU) to prevent the usage of Amazon’s Kindle DX eReader as a means of distributing electronic textbooks to its students.

Darrell Shandrow, a blind student pursuing a degree in journalism at ASU, said: “Not having access to the advanced reading features of the Kindle DX—including the ability to download books and course materials, add my own bookmarks and notes, and look up supplemental information instantly on the Internet when I encounter it in my reading—will lock me out of this new technology and put me and other blind students at a competitive disadvantage relative to our sighted peers. While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible texts to be prepared for me, and these texts will not provide the access and features available to other students. That is why I am standing up for myself and with other blind Americans to end this blatant discrimination.”

[via teleread]

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