Quote:
Originally Posted by wyndslash
i'm not trying to start a fight with anyone, but whenever i read some threads in some other parts of the forum and encounter the usual debate about blind people and ereaders, i always get ticked off by some of the apparently callous remarks. it's like they're saying that the blind just should not use an ereader because it's not "for them". why is it that technology shouldn't be designed to help everyone? i don't know...maybe i've just lived too long in a 3rd world country. my parents always said i was too idealistic *sigh*
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There's a awful lot of technology intended to assist the visually impaired. Some folks with poor vision like ereaders precisely because they can do things like increase the font size to something they find readable.
But for the legally blind, even that may not be sufficient. One of the long time MR posters has increasingly bad vision. She likes her iPad because she
can read on it - she can no longer make out the print on her Sony Reader, even at the largest font setting. And some folks simply can't see at all. Their option is braille or an audio book, so whether an ereader will be useful will depend on whether it has audio capabilities and can play audio books, or whether it supports text-to-speech and can effectively read the book to them.
Even if the reader supports text-to-speech, the ebook may have it disabled.
A friend elsewhere was deeply unhappy about that: her mother is now legally blind. Mom was a geologist, and there was a geology tome she would love to read, but text-to-speech had been disabled on the electronic file available through Amazon. This was apparently a result of pressure by the Author's Guild on Amazon, because having it spoken would be considered a "performance". If there were an audio version of the book, it might generate an additional sale, but there isn't, so the Author's Guild guaranteed
no sale to someone visually impaired who would otherwise have bought the book.
I'm unhappy at callous remarks, but people saying an ereader is the wrong solution for a blind person may be correct.
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Dennis