[gui-talk] Fwd: Article: Schools shun Kindle, saying blind can't use it

[Steve Pattison]

 From:    Susan Thompson susan at sthompson.net
 To:      vip-l at lists.pacific.net.au

Schools shun Kindle, saying blind can't use it

By RACHEL METZ (AP) - 5 hours ago

SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon's Kindle can read books aloud, but if you're blind it
can be difficult to turn that function on without help. Now two universities
say they will shun the device until Amazon changes the setup.

The National Federation of the Blind planned to announce Wednesday that the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University won't consider big
rollouts of the electronic reading device unless Amazon makes it more
accessible to visually impaired students.

Both schools have some Kindles that they bought for students to try this
fall, but now they say they won't look into buying more unless Amazon makes
changes to the device.

"These universities are saying, `Our policy is nondiscrimination, so we're
not going to adopt a technology we know for sure discriminates against blind
students,'" said Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of
the Blind.

Amazon.com <http://amazon.com/>  Inc. spokesman Drew Herdener said many
visually impaired customers have asked Amazon to make the Kindle easier to
navigate. The company is working on it, he said.

According to the National Federation of the Blind, there are about 1.3
million legally blind people in the U.S. Many more people have other
disabilities such as dyslexia that make it difficult to read.

The Kindle could be promising for the visually impaired because of its
read-aloud feature, which utters text in a robotic-sounding voice. For blind
students in particular, the Kindle could be an improvement over existing
studying techniques - such as using audio books or scanning books page by
page into a computer so character-recognition software can translate it for
a text-to-speech program.

But activating the Kindle's audio feature probably requires a sighted
helper, because the step involves manipulating buttons and navigating
choices in menus that appear on the Kindle's screen.

The federation says the device should be able to speak the menu choices as
well.

Electronic books still make up a small portion of the overall book market,
but it's a fast-growing segment. In hopes of getting even more people to try
the Kindle, Amazon released the $489 Kindle DX this year, which has a large
screen and is geared toward textbook and newspaper readers. The company then
worked with several colleges to give out Kindles this fall with digital
versions of their textbooks on them.

The Federation for the Blind sued one of the schools that participated in
this pilot program - Arizona State University - in June, along with the
American Council of the Blind and a blind ASU student, arguing it was
discriminating against blind students. That case is ongoing.

The group also filed complaints with the Department of Justice against five
other schools that are participating in the Kindle trial with Amazon.
Wisconsin and Syracuse are not among those schools.

Ken Frazier, director of Wisconsin-Madison's library system, said the
library bought 20 Kindle DX devices for use in a history class this fall.
Though he's not sure how many blind students are at his school, he said many
students have difficulties reading texts for various reasons, such as
learning disabilities.

"Our experience is that when you make technology accessible, everybody
benefits," he said.

Copyright (c) 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.


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Katherine Schneider, Ph.D.
Senior Psychologist, Emerita
Counseling Service
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
schneiks at uwec.edu

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