For some time now I have defended the Kindle 2 as a tool for accessible reading for people who are print impaired. The fact that I am severely visually impaired and yet was able to use my Kindle readily without audio on the navigation made the clamor from groups like the national Federation of Blind e more annoying to me. When they were able to get universities to stop assigning Kindles until they were 100% accessible made me wonder what two stodgy immovable institutions, academia and the blind accessibility community would finally make a breakthrough.
Of course, the answer is neither. The advocates will take credit for it, but it is Amazon, the Kindle's maker, that came through in the end. At least one representative of a blind organization expressed to me his lack of faith in Amazon, so I had the pleasure today of saying, "I told you so!" In fact, Amazon's Kindle 3 has fully accessible navigation.
Knowing the radical advocates as I do, I knew there would be a "yeah but.." It only took a little more than an hour to get it. The spokesperson for one organization pointed out that while indeed the Kindle 3 has accessible navigation, the new experimental web browser on it is not blessed with text to speech. Oh and the fact that the newest Kindle is less expensive than the Kindle 2 means, at least in the mind of this person, they were overcharging for the old ones. This person's commentary resulted in one fellow on a blind discussion group to conclude that if the Kindle 3 is not fully accessible, then it's of no use to him.
Frankly, I don't care about this web browser... I wish Amazon did not have to come up with it to compete with Apple's iPad. As a person with a visual disability, I am happy to confine my browsing to my home computer with its ridiculously expensive adaptive software. I want the Kindle for reading and portability.
It's not a popular opinion but I think that groups like the NFB will always find something wanting in any effort that, by the way, competes with their own overpriced tool. Their motivation for crying "Sour grapes!" seems suspect to me.
I run a historical fiction online chat. If the rest of the print impaired people on it would give it up and just embrace the Kindle 3 our choice of nooks to discuss would increase exponentially. Just now all we can read are the National Library Service books or, with much grumbling, BookShare.org. The latter depends on volunteers scanning books they want to read so that they are accessible to people via text and text readers. The former takes a good long time to get any book into their library no less in a format that does not break halfway through much of the time. I wish I could simply choose books that anyone with a Kindle 3 could read. It would be nice to feel like a grownup once in a while instead of a tantrum-throwing kid.
Nan Hawthorne
P.S. The latest criticism of the Kindle is that "fifty percent of the books have text to speech disabled". First of all, I doubt that number, and second of all that still beats the National Library Service for the Blind.
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