Amazon Kindle Blind-Sided by the Blind

Posted by Editor on Jan 14, 2010 in Amazon Kindle, Tablets

Amazon and the U.S. Department of Justice recently settled a civil suit brought on by a number of blind person’s rights organizations over pilot projects to use the Kindle DX as a reader device in universities. The underlying issue for the blind is that although the Kindle has a text to speech feature which can read books aloud, the standard menu and navigation of the device is impossible for a non-sighted person to use. Also, that the universities intended to essentially replace traditional textbooks in the classrooms with the device. Did Amazon get caught in the middle?

If you think about it, most devices of this kind have no special provisions for the blind. Cell phones can be voice dialed but good luck setting the initial menus up without the help of a sighted person. Mac OS X and Windows can be configured to speak menus items aloud, though not out of the box.

Amazon is sort of caught in the middle here, they didn’t necessarily come up with the idea in the first place and probably never imagined their device would be such a problem for the blind. But maybe they should have considered it in the initial design that a few extra modifications would have made the device a big help for the blind, such as speakable menu items and less uniform buttons. Sound off in the comments if you think they got a bum deal here.

Personally it seems to me that the schools should not be imposing a particular device nor spending their budgets on expensive gadgets. That’s not to say that individual students should be disallowed from choosing to use a tablet or e-book reader in their daily coursework, just that the conduit should not be the school itself. Otherwise the possibility of disenfranchising the disabled with new technology is too great, and that’s just what the DOJ had to say. More details over at CNET.