Department of Justice says Kindles in classrooms denies blind students equal access

[thewayne]

"Three US universities will stop promoting the use of Amazon.com's Kindle DX e-book reader in classrooms after complaints that the device doesn't give blind students equal access to information. Settlements with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City and Reed College in Portland, Oregon, were announced Wednesday by the US Department of Justice. The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind had complained that use of the Kindle devices discriminates against students with vision problems."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/13/2159231/US-DOJ-Says-Kindle-In-Classroom-Hurts-Blind-Students?art_pos=15

I think the Kindle is a heck of a product even though I don't own one. I did get to play with one and was fairly impressed, what doesn't impress me is the DRM lockdown and the price of books. I didn't like the idea of a Kindle being your 'only' college text book as I didn't think the implementation had evolved enough. When some universities started integrating Kindles, one student's comment summed it up for me perfectly. The student said that when I'm working on a paper, I've got four or five books open at the same time, flipping back and forth between them. You just can't do that with a Kindle. You can do it with a laptop with ebooks, but even then it's better to have the physical book.

But the interesting thing is that the Kindle has text-to-speech built-in. But apparently their navigation functions aren't usable by blind people, I guess that's where the problem started.

I worked at NMSU and have attended a lot of different colleges, including working in computer labs. They've always had Braille printers, and those things are noisy as hell. They weren't used all the time, but they were still frequently used.

Comments

[anyeone.livejournal.com]

As long as the class materials are also available in BRAILLE then I don't see a problem. A blind person can't read a REGULAR text book either.

This whole thing makes no sense to me. The only real advantage the students get having their books on kindle is that they are much lighter to lug around.

I love my Kindle, don't get me wrong, and I do think Amazon needs to fast-forward their blind-friendly features, but sheesh...

[deborak]

Oh, let's just poke everyone's eyes out for equality! >_<

I don't know how many more discrimination shakedowns I can ignore before I go postal.

[silveradept]

While it seems silly, they do have a point - if you're going to make your device accessible, you need to make all of it accessible, not just the things you want to make accessible.

Having played with the kindle some myself, I'm impressed that someone blind can use the device and its interface at all - there wasn't a whole lot of differentiation of various things on the book itself.