University of Illinois to Only Use Accessible E-book Technology

11/19/2009 8:49:00 AM

The NFB today applauded the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for publicly announcing its commitment to purchasing e-book technology that can be used by the blind and others with print disabilities.  The announcement comes on the heels of news that the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Syracuse University will not broadly deploy Amazon’s Kindle DX e-book reading device, which Amazon is marketing as a replacement for traditional print textbooks, until the device is fully accessible to blind students.  The Kindle DX features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud.  The menus of the device are not accessible to the blind, however, making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX.  For more on this, please read the official press release.