Amazon Kindle Should be Fully Accessible to the Blind by Summer 2010

If you were wondering what the most tweeted thing amongst the blind community was yesterday, it would have to be that Amazon plans to be releasing a kindle that is accessible to the blind by summer of next year. According to the press release, Amazon is working on adding TTS to their menu systems so that those of us who can't read print can use the Kindle. It looks like with a little prodding, a mainstream company can see that the disabled community is worth marketing to.

When I read about this, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was ecstatic because the Kindle would be another product that I could purchase that would be accessible to me without me adding any software to it. I was also excited because Amazon heard the message from the blind community and they listened.

On the other hand, I then remembered the issue with the Author's Guild. As it stands right now publishers can turn off the TTS feature on any book they want to. The whole Random House collection still has TTS turned off as far as I know, and who knows how many other publishers will decide to take this action. This means that even if I were to buy a Kindle, that there may be a lot of books that still would be out of my reach thanks to greedy publishers. The other concern that people on twitter brought up was their fear of us having to prove our disability to have full access to the TTS features. As it stands right now, most of the services that the blind and disabled use are restricted to our use. What this means is that we have to "prove" that we have a disability before we have the right to use the service. If Amazon is going to require this of us, many people may choose to not buy the Kindle because they're tired of having to be on a special list to use a product.

So from my standpoint this news is a good thing. Although I am concerned about TTS being turned off on books that I may want to own, I think it's great that in less than a year I should have the opportunity to see what the Kindle is like and decide if it is something I would want to purchase. I hope other companies follow in Amazon's footsteps, and that the number of products that the disabled can use that are made by mainstream companies only continues to grow.

What are your thoughts about the Kindle becoming accessible?