“Two organizations representing the blind have settled a discrimination lawsuit against Arizona State University over its use of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader device. … The university, which denies the pilot program violates any law, agreed that if it does decide to use e-book readers in future classes over the next two years, ‘it will strive to use devices that are accessible to the blind,’ according to their joint statement.” [AP/ABC News; earlier] Related: Berin Szoka, “An Internet for everyone” [L.A. Times/City Journal]
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So give everyone an equal disadvantage? Hindering education for the sighted furthers the education for the blind…how?
Last June, the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind joined a blind ASU student in suing Arizona State, alleging that the Kindle’s inaccessibility to blind students constituted a violation of federal law.
I guess the next lawsuit will be to outlaw the use of paper books. After all they are clearly inaccessible to blind students.
So apparently the solution is to give ASU students the equivalent of a speak and spell? Sounds about right. Go devils!
Call me crazy, but weren’t old-fashioned paper textbooks not very blind-user friendly?
Did I miss the part in the article where ASU owns and is responsible for Kindle? Was it not a “trial basis”? Guess some California ADA lawyers were in town and bored.
The choice of the kindle is the issue, since amazon went out of their way to placate publishers; allowing them to disable the text-to-speech.
I would think if the university select a e-reader that didn’t go out if its way to block text-to-speech functionality the suit would not have been necessary.
[…] If, as Tyler Cowen suggests, the key market objective of the iPad is to obtain significant university adoption as a replacement for the paper textbook, one wonders how Apple’s lawyers are planning to handle the inevitable litigation from disabled-rights advocates. […]