Quote:
Originally Posted by jlmwrite
Ummm, even at the risk of incurring the wrath of anyone who is vision-impaired, can anyone tell me how the Kindle is less accessible than a standard printed textbook?
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You would have to ask the ACB, I suppose, but they just want to make sure that new technology doesn't get established without the needs of vision-impaired people taken into consideration. It took years before PCs really took this requirement on in a serious way, and at every turn (GUIs, web browsers) technology ignored them at first. At last now we are starting to see companies like Apple build assistive technologies into version 1.
As for printed textbooks, there has been assistive technology for that for awhile. Sure, you could line an optical scanner/reader up on a Kindle just like it was a book (except books don't have menus to navigate...) but the point is that under the law, technology paid for by taxpayer dollars needs to fulfill some basic accessibility requirements, rather than putting up insurmountable barriers.
And yes, Kindle is powerful enough to handle simple voice recognition. It was being done on IBM PC-AT's years ago, and Kindle is at least 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster, with more RAM.