Spotted on The Mac-cessibility Site, Anazon’s Kindle team is working on some accessibility improvements. The main focus seems to be on voice feedback during navigation. The lack of an audio interface meant that the Kindle text-to-speech feature, Talk to Me, would not be accessible to blind users without the help of a sighted person. Introducing audio feedback completes the loop for the independent use of the Kindle by the visually impaired.

According to the Amazon Kindle’s Blog:

We’ve heard from many of our blind or vision impaired customers who are excited about Kindle 2′s text to speech technology. Some of these customers have asked that we make Kindle even easier for them by adding navigation accessible to the blind. We want to let those customers know that this is something we are working on and we look forward to making it available in the future. –The Amazon Kindle Team

As is pointed out on The Mac-cessibility Site,  this features’s usefulness depends on the available of TTS-enabled content on the Kindle. As Amazon has surrenedered contorl of TTS to the publishing industry, it is vital that publishers and authors grant TTS access to their Kindle publicaitons for this accessibility improvement to be meaningful. The Mac-cessibility Site encourages all to contact the Author’s Guild, the organization that pushed Amazon to relinquish control of TTS, to petition them to rescind their demands.  I have done so and also encourage you to do the same (contact information for the Guild can be found on The Mac-cessibility Site). At this point, an equally important push needs to be given to the authors and publishers of the books you would like to read on the new Kindle. Though tracking down the proper contact infromation needs to be done for each publisher and author, the only way for them to understand the import is to hear from us. Speak, so that we may not only be heard, but also hear (on the Kindle, that is).

Tags: accessibility, accessibility improvements, amazon, amazon kindle, audio interface, books, interface, text to speech

This entry was posted on March 21, 2009 at 4:19 pm and is filed under large print. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.