The Kindle Controversy

This article first appeared in the latest National Center on Disability and Access to Education newsletter. NCDAE seeks to improve education for all by promoting accessibility in electronically-mediated education. It is a project at the CPD.

Amazon’s Kindle had generated a lot of buzz over the past few years. This innovation is an electronic paper display that uses wireless technology to allow users to purchase and read over 275,000 book titles on a display that is lighter and easier to carry than a typical paperback book. The buzz turned ugly when Amazon announced that their new version (Kindle 2) would include a text to speech function. This caused the Author’s Guild to object – complaining that this infringed on copyright laws and would damage sales of audio books. Amazon then agreed to give the publisher’s the option to disable this functionality.

However, advocates for the blind and reading disabled protested – vocally! They argued that removing this function was discriminatory and interfered with their rights to equal access. Furthermore, they argued, text to speech is not a threat to audio books – audio books are performances while the synthetic voice used by text readers, while much improved over early versions, is not the same as a professionally read book.

The Authors Guild then suggested that those with print disabilities take advantage of an exception to the copyright act that allows them, with special certification, to activate their Kindles to override the voice restrictions placed on the book by the publisher. However, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) argued that this places undue burden on the users who must prove they qualify or pay extra for the functionality.

Even with the text to speech functionality, Kindle 2 was not fully accessible, with limited font sizes. It also lacked voice prompts for the menus. However, Amazon is working on making the Kindle usable for sightless navigation and the Reading Rights Coalition is circulating an online petition to stop the removal of the text to speech option.

This issue is critical as the outcome will likely inform copyright and accessibility issues for years to come.

Note: Since the original article’s publication, Yahoo! News reports that two universities refused to use Amazon’s Kindle DX as a way to distribute textbooks, citing accessibility issues.

Disabled World has published an overview of the Kindle 2′s accessibility.

For a look at the original article and an extended list of links on the subject, see the NCDAE newsletter.