according to the one review I saw on its accessibility features for those with disabilities.
There is a petition asking amazon to make the Kindle 2 fully accessible.
To be fair,
1. I wrote to the Kindle Team at amazon about a demo so I could review the Kindle 2, but that didn't happen.
2. If anyone else knows of any reviews of the accessibility features, please leave them in the comments.
3. If anyone with a disability actually owns and has used a Kindle 2, please leave some feedback in the comments. Please note, however, that anonymous comments are often moderated out by me on products because it's so easy to 'plant' a positive comment.
Of course there are lots of reviews by people that don't really address the concerns we may have about the Kindle 2 features.
Another one right here.
UPDATE: Tim O'Brien, a legally blind photographer, has posted about the first Kindle and hopes to review the Kindle 2.
AccessAbility writes about Kindle's legal battle with the Author's Guild about the text to speech features on the Kindle 2
The Authors Guild argues that the reading of a book out loud by a machine is a copyright infringement unless the copyright holder has specifically granted permission for the book to be read aloud.
The National Federation of the Blind responds:
... blind people routinely use readers, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio. Up until now, no one has argued that this is illegal, but now the Authors Guild says that it is. This is absolutely wrong. The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright.
4 comments:
as a Quad geek, I would love to learn more about it!
There's an inaccessibility issue that's prevented me from trading in for a Kindle 2, and that is the lack of page numbers that correspond to "real" page numbers of the same edition. I use Kindle because it's lighter than a book and more transportable, but I need those page numbers to reference. This means my Kindle can mostly be used only for my light reading rather than serious projects.
They're also cutting into their student market here--when people expect students to look at a certain page in a text, someone using a Kindle can't do so.
Greg- me too :)
Frida- yes that limit on it is a real problem for me in terms of independence. I can not depend on my Kindle in many ways because I can't find a certain page, or I'd use it a lot more with scanning documents in for meetings, work, etc. A very serious limit as an assistive device.
it's easy to imagine the Kindle being combined with the functionality of a cell phone, PDA and mp3 player to make an all-in-one gadget
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