Archive for the ‘kindle ereaders for visually impaired and blind’ tag
Amazon Announces New Kindle Features to Help Blind and Vision-Impaired Readers 1 comment
In a press release this morning Amazon is announcing that it is working on new features that will make its Kindle ereaders easier for blind and vision-impaired readers to use.
“Kindle is for anyone who loves to read—in fact, we’ve heard from thousands of vision-impaired customers and customers with learning disabilities over the past two years who have been helped tremendously by Kindle,” said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “With some key modifications, we believe Kindle can be a breakthrough device for the blind, and the team is excited about making these enhancements.”
The new enhancements are said to include an audible menu system and a new seventh font size that will be twice as large as the current largest font. Expect these new features to reach your Kindle ereader by summer 2010.
All of this is no doubt in response to the Kindle DX’s university trials getting shut down recently by the National Federation of the Blind, which says that the Kindle DX ereaders discriminate against the visually impaired. This due to the fact that even though the Kindle’s Text to Speech feature is of benefit to those with visual impairments, it is often very difficult to impossible for the people who need the feature the most to operate the controls without the aid of a sighted person.
