Amazon’s new Kindle DX, designed for reading textbooks and newspapers, will include text-to-speech to allow students with print disabilities to read textbooks out loud.
Amazon’s Director of Kindle Books, Laura Porco, said the company is working with three of the top five textbook publishers — Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley, along with more than 75 University Press Publishers to make their educational materials available in the Kindle Store starting this summer. With content accessible in an audio version to everyone — not just to those who can “prove†they have a print
disability — Amazon and publishers have taken a big step in breaking down barriers to educational content for people with disabilities.
The Kindle DX has a 9.7-inch electronic display, a built-in PDF reader and the ability to automatically switch from portrait to landscape. It can store up to 3,500 books, and also lets readers annotate and take notes. The e-book reader works with real ink to display complex charts, images, tables, graphs, and equations. In a demonstration showing a pilots’ air-traffic map, a biology textbook and
a cookbook, all images looked crisp and graphic-rich.
But the National Federation of the Blind doesn’t think the Kindle DX goes far enough: The e-book reader’s menus and controls aren’t audio-accessible to the blind and visually impaired. The NFB
says deploying this device in college and universities would violate state and federal laws requiring equal access to textbooks and course materials for students with disabilities.
“We are appalled that Amazon is releasing a new Kindle device ostensibly for the use of students that does not contain features that make it accessible to the blind, said Dr. Marc Maurer, president of the
NFB. “Amazon [should] introduce a user interface for the Kindle that is accessible to the blind as soon as possible. Until [then], no college or university should deploy this device,†he added.
