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.
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i figure that among the thousands of apps in the iphone, there is one to make it accessible. and supposedly all apps in the iphone work in the ipad.
While I haven’t made the switch to an iPhone, I do know that OS X already has a great deal of accessibility built in. Plus, as I have commented here before, the Kindle’s accessibility or lack thereof had little to do with Amazon getting sued. They were just a big convenient headline-getting target. Oh wait, Target has already been sued by these same groups.
Free distribution through government agencies to the handicapped. Perhaps accomplished via congressional earmark.
From the Apple iPad Tech Specs webpage:
Accessibility
Support for playback of closed-captioned content
VoiceOver screen reader
Full-screen zoom magnification
White on black display
Mono audio
Very similar to OS X and appears to provide the features demanded of the Kindle.
One thing I see WRT these devices, unlike digital music players, print publishers are not yet in the position of having their traditional market implode. They just don’t feel the squeeze of everyone stealing their product because electronic media simply is not the same. And thus you have a discount for e-text, but not nearly what it needs to be for such devices to really take off and you have the TTS disabling when you do have e-text. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand seem like they would be a much better niche to attempt getting people to convert, and possibly some specialty areas such as law. But I just don’t see traditional print being sunk any time soon, perhaps when a direct neural interface is invented.