Washington
– Several universities that had begun using Amazon’s (NASD: AMZN) Kindle e-book reader in
classrooms have agreed, under the terms of a settlement with the Justice Dept.,
to halt those experiments until the device is upgraded to provide functionality
for blind students, the Associated Press reported.
The agreement came after the
National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, along
with a blind student at Arizona
State University,
filed suit last year over the use of the Kindle in classrooms.
While the Kindle does have
a text-to-speech feature that reads e-books out loud, it has no similar
"spoken" controls that would help a blind person navigate the buttons on the device.
The Justice Dept. says that the agreement also covers other e-book readers on the market.
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/u2kio
(AP)
This is silly. If we waited for all inventions to be handicapped accessible, then we wouldn’t have paper, computers, cars, libraries, televisions, airplanes, and on.. and on..