[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore

I don't think its good that they are going to deny students access to something that would be helpful to the majority simply because it would not be as useful to a minority.

That's pretty much the purpose of anti-discrimination laws: they say that you can't provide goods or services to the majority in a way that ignores the needs of certain minorities. They can't create a bus line that doesn't have access for people with disabilities, and can't make stores with narrow walkways that can't be navigated by wheelchairs, on the grounds that "it'll be great for most people, and we don't need to deal with the needs of people with disabilities."

Businesses (in my state) are also not allowed to offer "couple's discounts" that are only good for a married man and woman, but not two married men. Nor are they allowed to offer "Free Haircuts For White People."

I mean, if the school were going to give out free graphing calculators to the students should it refrain from doing so because there is no way for the visually impaired to read the display?

And I suspect that, if the universities were giving free horseback riding lessons, nobody would be complaining those aren't accessible enough. The issue here is that the Kindle *could* be fully accessible, and isn't. The features it would need to be usable by blind students are obvious, and other computer devices have those features.

I have doubts that the lawsuit will go anywhere, but I don't know the terms of the Kindles-for-students contracts or the background of how universities have to comply with the ADA. It's possible that some people thought the Kindles were compliant because they have TTS, and it was only later realized that TTS isn't useful if you can't get to it without seeing the buttons.