[A2k] Doug Lederman: Challenge to the Kindle (Inside Higher Ed)

[Manon Ress]

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle

  Challenge to the Kindle
July 6, 2009

The slow but inexorable move to electronic textbooks, accelerated by
the emergence of e-readers like Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader,
holds great promise for students who are visually impaired. Digital
formats can easily be transferred into audio recordings or texts
printed in Braille, avoiding the piecemeal system by which most
colleges' disability resource centers turn individual textbooks into
versions that are accessible to the blind.

But instead of welcoming May's news that numerous colleges were
experimenting with Amazon's Kindle DX as a way to bring digital
textbooks to their students, advocates for the visually impaired are
strenuously objecting to it. The National Federation of the Blind and
the American Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit last month against
Arizona State University, saying that its plan to use the Kindle to
distribute books to students is illegal because blind people cannot
use the device as currently configured. (The groups also asked the
U.S. Departments of Education and Justice to examine the Kindle
deployments planned by the five other colleges.) The Kindle DX has
built-in technology that translates digital books into audio, but
users can get to that feature only through on-screen menus that are
not accessible to the blind.

"It's unfair to blind people for this device to be deployed but for
blind students not have access to it," said Chris Danielson, director
of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind. "It's
ironic, because this is a technical development that should improve
accessibility for blind students. But the reality is that right now it
doesn't. And until it does, these colleges should hold off."

A spokesman for Arizona State, Virgil Renzulli, said the university is
"committed to equal access for all students." The university has
joined in a pilot program for the Kindle reader for a single course
where students may also access traditional textbooks. Renzulli said
that Arizona State will help any visually impaired students in those
courses, as it does all students, through its disability resource
centers that provide "the necessary tools so that all students with
disabilities have an equal opportunity to be successful in their
academic pursuits."

Advocates for the blind are no fans of the historically expensive,
time-intensive system by which most colleges make textbooks accessible
to visually impaired students, which require campus disability
resource centers to rip up physical textbooks and transform them into
digital files that can be run through text-to-speech software or
turned into braille versions.

The emergence of publisher-produced digital textbooks has occurred for
other reasons, but the development has enormous potential for the
blind -- a promise that is already incorporated into the Kindle DX.
The device has "read-to-me" software that allows users to "switch back
and forth between reading and listening," and enabling them to "choose
from both male and female voices which can be sped up or slowed down
to suit your preference," per Amazon's promotional material.

But the catch, to the dismay of Darrell Shandrow, a blind student at
Arizona State and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, is that the only way to
turn on Kindle's text-to-speech function (or to select a book or use
any of the device's many other features, for that matter) is to use
its on-screen menu -- which is inaccessible to the visually impaired.

Software exists that can use audio or keyboard shortcuts to make menus
available, says Danielson of the federation for the blind. But Amazon
has chosen not to incorporate that technology into the Kindle at this
point, and by adopting the device as-is, Arizona State and the other
universities are violating the Americans With Disabilities Act and the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the groups allege in their lawsuit and
federal complaints.

"Given the highly-advanced technology involved, there is no good
reason that Amazon=92s Kindle DX device should be inaccessible to blind
students," Marc Maurer, the federation's president, said in a prepared
statement. "Amazon could have used the same text-to-speech technology
that reads e-books on the device aloud to make its menus accessible to
the blind, but it chose not to do so. Worse yet, six American higher
education institutions that are subject to federal laws requiring that
they not discriminate against students with disabilities plan to
deploy this device, even though they know that it cannot be used by
blind students."

Officials at Amazon did not respond to multiple requests for comment
about Kindle's technology. In addition to the statement from Arizona
State, administrators at some of the other colleges in Amazon's
textbook experiment (Case Western Reserve University, the University
of Virginia's business school, Pace and Princeton Universities, and
Reed College) said they had no intention of discriminating against the
visually impaired.

=93Our pilot program is a limited test through which we intend to assess
the usefulness of the Kindle devices for our students," read a
statement from Pace University. "We have not yet finalized the details
of our test or adopted the Kindle device on a widespread basis or as a
part of a formal or required aspect of Pace=92s curriculum. Of course we
will be sure to accommodate any student with a disability, including
blindness, appropriately and according to all applicable laws.=94
=97 Doug Lederman





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Manon Ress
manon.ress@keionline.org
Knowledge Ecology International
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