Kindle 2, the blind, & ASU decide to play nice . . . for now

Arizona State University (ASU) recently ran a test placing some textbooks on the Kindle 2 platform and handing them out to students. The goal was to understand how using an eBook reader would impact student behavior while also exploring the economic and environmental ramifications.

Being a public institution put ASU in a unique circumstance where it touches a wide cross-segment of people, some of which are blind. The Kindle 2 has text-to-speech built in but activating that function requires a few on-screen navigations that a blind person wouldn’t be able to facilitate independently.

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are interested in driving that point home and they decided to approach it in a very direct way with a lawsuit against ASU. This particular conflict ended amicably, partially because the test is ending and partially because Amazon is working to bring easier access for the blind on future iterations of the Kindle 2.

While using Kindle 2 on a mass scale like at universities would certainly reduce the amount of paper used in the cycle, it would increase the amount of plastics and metals via the device’s component parts.

The two blindness organizations and ASU reached a settlement “does not involve payment of any damages or attorney's fees. Rather, the groups cited ASU's commitment to providing access to all of its programs for students with disabilities, and noted that the pilot program was already ending this spring,” according to ABC.

Amazon has announced that it plans to introduce audible menus for the Kindle 2 but hasn’t committed to specific timeline yet, only citing “next summer”. If nothing else, the blindness organizations made a point that new technology needs to welcome people with disabilities or it will instead welcome a wealth of bad press.