An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos at Amazon
Does Amazon have a Chief Accessibility Officer? Someone who oversees accessibility issues across the company? It does not seem so. With Amazon at the heart of both online shopping and digital books (audio and e-books), you need a strong corporate position on accessibility. Not only is there a moral duty for this, but a fiduciary one as well. The market for accessible products is only beginning to bloom as the baby boomers stat to retire. As tech savvy customers age and their eyesight fades, there will be a strong market impetus towards offering accessibility.
The first issue facing Amazon is this Kindle controversy over the Talk to Me feature. Offering this capability makes the Kindle 2 nearly the holy grail of accessible reading devices for the visually impaired. Yet, allowing the publishers to disable text to speech reduces the accessibility of the device and may lose a significant market for the Kindle. Amazon needs someone who can find solutions for this situation. Perhaps Amazon should partner with the National Library Service for the Blind to provide TTS-enabled books to qualified individuals until the publishers see that Talk to Me is in their best interest.
Second, Amazon now owns the premier distributor of audio books in the worked. Audible.com has long worked with its blind customers. Yet the Audible web site and software are far from easy to use for customer with less than good vision. Each day that Amazon does not address this issue is another day that Amazon denies itself a large and growing market.
Amazon needs someone to develop and implement a corporate policy on accessibility . Amazon can not afford to miss this under-appreciated market opportunity. Amazon needs a Chief Accessibility Officer.
If you are interested, I can send you my resume.
Thank you for your time.
Tim O’Brien
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I agree that they need an accessibility coordinator. If you get the job, can I be your second in command?
Somehow, I do not see my getting the job. Even though, I think I would be good at it.