Amazon Plans to Make the Kindle More Visually Impaired Friendly

Amazon is reportedly working on making its Kindle more friendly tovisually-impaired users, according to a Yahoo Tech News report.  This is in response to the requests received by Amazon from those who are urging the company to make the Kindle easier to navigate for the blind people.

Although the Kindle can read books aloud, via its text-to-speech technology, some schools with visually impaired students find it hard to turn on that function without asking for help from somebody.

Because of this, the National Federation of the Blind will announce that the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse won’t support the Kindle unless Amazon makes it easier to use for the blind. These two universities advocates nondiscrimination when it comes to access to education, hence any technology that discriminates the blind students, such as the Kindle should not be adopted or used.

Earlier this year, the Federation have already sued Arizona State University for participating in the Kindle trial program. The case is still ongoing as of today.

Given this problem, Amazon needs to upgrade its Kindle  if it wants to gain popularity among universities, especially those with specific policy on nondiscrimination of students.

If not, universities may consider getting other ereaders with this functionality, one of which is the Intel Reader.