TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home
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Nine Disability Organizations Speak Out about Kindle 2 Text to Speech
Thursday, March 19th, 2009By Paul Biba
The following is a press release from The International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet. http://www.icdri.org/legal/Kindle_Issues.htm. Thanks to Robert Martinengo for the heads up.
On 16 March 2009, a letter went out from disability organizations to six major publishers that sell Kindle ebooks: Random House, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Penguin and Hachette. These letters insist that Text to Speech be turned back on. At this time, Random House has disabled text to speech on all of its ebooks. Letters were a collaborative effort written on behalf of nine disability organizations: The National Federation of the Blind, the DAISY Consortium, the American Foundation for the Blind, the American Council of the Blind, the International Dyslexia Association, the American Association of People with Disabilities, the National Center for Learning Disabilities and the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.
Here is part of one of the letters:
We are even more appalled to learn that Amazon, under pressure, would henceforth allow publishers and authors at their whim to withdraw mainstream access to electronic books for those requiring aural access. This seems especially ironic in the wake of the proposed Google-AAP settlement, which guarantees mainstream access (including persons with disabilities) to all copyrighted books that are not currently offered for sale. We are saddened to see that Random House has now instructed that text-to-speech be disabled for all devices that read electronic books. For a terribly long time those with print disabilities have been consigned to alternative formats with limited choices on expensive special purpose machines. Now that the opportunity for mainstream access to books on equal terms is possible, this community will not allow publishers and authors to deny them the right to read.
