The title is a pretty innocuous phrasing of a great big bombshell. A coalition of e-reader manufacturers consisting of Amazon, Kobo and Sony, filed a petition requesting the FCC waive its rules requiring e-readers to be accessible by people with disabilities.
According to the
Coalition petition (PDF):
Quote:
The public interest would be served by granting this petition because the theoretical ACS ability of ereaders is irrelevant to how the overwhelming majority of users actually use the devices. [...]
Granting the petition is in the public interest because rendering ACS accessible on e-readers would require fundamentally altering the devices to be more like general-purpose tablets in cost, form factor, weight, user interface, and reduced battery life, and yet the necessary changes, if they were made, would not yield a meaningful benefit to individuals with disabilities.
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According to
the letter (PDF) supplementing the petition, e-readers are a distinctive class designed primarily for reading, because they all share the following characteristics (that make them different from, let's say, tablets):
- they have no LCD screen;
- they have no camera;
- they are not offered or shipped to consumers with built-in email, IM, VoIP or other similar ACS client applications and the device manufacturer does not develop ACS applications for them;
- they are marketed to consumers as reading devices and promotional material about them does not tout the capability to access ACS.
Anybody care to bite?