Kindle Review – Kindle 2 Review, Books

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that two Blind Groups are suing Arizona State University for using the Kindle DX.

They have also filed complaints with federal agencies against the 5 universities using the Kindle DX in pilot projects.

Suing Universities to get better Kindle support for blind people?

This is really strange strategy. The motivation seems to be to force Amazon to add more features for blind students -

While the Kindle DX has text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud, the National Federation of the Blind and American Council of the Blind said blind students cannot use the device’s menus to purchase books from Amazon.com’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature or use the advanced reading functions.

Well, Amazon has already said its working on these features (from the official Amazon Kindle blog) -

We’ve heard from many of our blind or vision impaired customers who are excited about Kindle 2’s text to speech technology.  Some of these customers have asked that we make Kindle even easier for them by adding navigation accessible to the blind.  We want to let those customers know that this is something we are working on and we look forward to making it available in the future. 

–The Amazon Kindle Team

Perhaps the Blind group can add in Folder Support to their law suit?

Will suing universities to get Kindle support for the blind work?

Apparently, its a well tested strategy  -

Last fall, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and the National Federation of the Blind reached an agreement with Apple Inc. (AAPL) under which the consumer-electronics giant agreed to make its iTunes service accessible to the blind.

The same strategy was also leveraged to get Target to make its website accessible to the blind.

There’s something called the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It might be this section -

Section 504 states that “no qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall be excluded from, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” any program or activity that either receives Federal financial assistance …

Will Amazon add extended support for the blind in Kindles soon?

I have no way of knowing. It does seem like they might not have a choice if they want Kindles to be used in educational institutions.

It’s actually going to help Amazon in the long run because the Kindle DX will end up being a very compelling device for blind and low vision people.