I am sure a lot of you remember how Amazon was getting a lot of flak for Kindle not being too friendly for the blind community. Amazon does come with Read-to-Me feature (or what’s left of it) to make it possible for Kindle owners to listen to their books on the go. But the National Federation of the Blind and other organizations have attacked Amazon in the past for being “discriminatory” towards the blind community. Let’s just say Amazon has listened and is now planning to introduce additional features on Kindle to make it more accessible to that group.
Amazon is introducing larger fonts and audible menu options to help visually impaired readers take advantage of Amazon Kindle much more conveniently. The company must not be happy by all the negative reaction that it has been getting from some universities for not being accessible to visually impaired students, so it had to take action. But will it be enough?
We still don’t know much about these features to judge whether they’ll satisfy the National Federation of the Blind. But we do know that they think of this move as a positive step forward. My suspicion is that they will still complain about Amazon not going far enough with these new features. Since Amazon is releasing these new features in 2010, it should have enough time to make every effort to make Kindle blind-friendly. Let’s hope other e-book manufacturers are ready to take the same steps. And let’s hope it all works out in the end. Am I being too optimistic?
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2 Responses to “Amazon Kindle To Become Blind Friendly”
I think Amazon had really been lazy with the Kindle, up until recently when they realized the Nook is going to be a serious competitor (if not the current version, then certainly a future model). Now we’re getting huge OTA updates, promises of more features just around the corner, and desktop applications for viewing purchases off of the Kindle. Honestly, this stuff was a long time coming, and there are still several ways for the device to improve that I can’t believe haven’t been implemented yet (and I’m not talking huge hardware changes). No customizable screensavers? That’s ridiculous, in my opinion, and B&N made absolutely the right decision there. (I cannot stand looking at Alexandre Dumas and Harriet Beecher Stowe, no matter how good their works are, and refresh the screen again when their pictures show up.) I’m anxious for them to implement the new organization system they spoke of last month, but I can’t believe they didn’t do that sooner, and I hope it’s pretty flexible (customizable categories, ability to put books in multiple categories, maybe utilize tags).
Anyway, I’m glad that Amazon is stepping up and giving us the features we should have had long ago, but it’s annoying that it took a serious competitor to make it happen.
Exactly. Though I wouldn’t call Amazon lazy. It’s just they have been very slow with their approach. Kindle will be strong for the foreseeable future but Amazon could have done much better.