National Federation of the Blind to Stage Protest Outside Amazon's Seattle Campus
December 06, 2012
The National Federation of the Blind will be staging a protest outside Amazon’s Seattle campus. The event will take place on December 12th starting 11:00 a.m. The organization has pleaded with Amazon multiple times to make their Kindle device more accessible to those who suffer from blindness or low vision. Given the lack of response, frustrations have surfaced especially since Kindles are making more appearances in school classrooms.
"At issue is the fact that while blind students can listen to Kindle content with the devices’ text-to-speech technology, Kindles don’t enable them to perform research functions on their own while reading, like checking spelling and punctuation, highlighting passages, and finding things in the dictionary, all of which are available to sighted students using Kindles, says NFB spokesperson Chris Danielsen...Amazon makes Kindle content available only to its own proprietary text-to-speech engine, which does not include basic technology for blind readers available elsewhere, according to Danielsen."