Hi to all.

I think the settlement reached leaves a few things to be desired (like specifics on what both ASU and Kindle are going to do), but a settlement has been reached.

Ted Chittenden

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/lawsuit-over-kindle-navigation-by-visually-impaired-settled.ars

Lawsuit over Kindle navigation by visually impaired settled
Arizona State University has settled a lawsuit over its plans for the Kindle brought by two groups representing the blind. The university now says that it will consider more accessible e-book options in the future—if Amazon wants in, it will need to offer better options for blind users.

By Jacqui Cheng | Last updated January 12, 2010 11:22 AMText Size   Print this articleLeave a comment The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) have settled a lawsuit against Arizona State University (ASU) over the university's plan to deploy the Kindle DX among students. The settlement involves no monetary damages, but ASU agreed to use devices that are more accessible to the blind if it chooses to deploy e-book readers in the coming years. If Amazon wants to be part of that deployment, it had better up its accessibility game. 

The groups originally filed suit against ASU and the Arizona Board of Regents in June 2009 after ASU began a pilot program to distribute electronic textbooks to students via the Kindle DX. The problem was that the Kindle only supports limited text-to-speech capabilities—users can have the device read books aloud, but the menu system and Kindle Store (among other things) were not part of this feature. As a result, blind students were unable to navigate the device, or even turn on the text-to-speech feature in the first place, without help from a seeing friend. This, according to the NFB and ACB, was a violation of both the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

ASU went back and forth with the two groups for a year and a half, admitting that the Kindle was not very accessible to the blind, but denying that they engaged in any kind of discrimination. ASU said that no blind or visually impaired students were prevented from enrolling in the one class that was participating in the Kindle DX pilot, and said that there were alternate reading options for those students. Still, the groups insisted this was an unsatisfactory argument, saying that it equated to "callous indifference to the right of blind students to receive an equal education." 

ASU apparently came around, because the university finally agreed to settle with the NFB and ACB. ASU said it was committed to providing access to all programs to students with disabilities, but also highlighted the fact that the pilot program was to end at the end of the current semester (spring 2010). The university agreed that it would evaluate e-book readers that were accessible to the blind if it chose to deploy them in the future, which was apparently enough for the two organizations to drop the suit. "The National Federation of the Blind is pleased with this settlement, which we believe will help to ensure that new technologies create new opportunities for blind students rather than new barriers," said NFB president Marc Maurer in a statement.

The groups said they also reached an agreement in part because "Amazon and others are making improvements to and progress in the accessibility of e-book readers," though they did not elaborate on what those improvements might consist of. Of course, there's the obvious: in March of last year—before the NFB and ACB brought their lawsuit—Amazon wrote on its Kindle Blog that it was working on adding text-to-speech capabilities to the Kindle's navigation system. But does Amazon have any other plans in mind? The company has already capitulated to the publishing industry's complaint about text-to-speech and allows publishers to retain control over whether their books can be read aloud, meaning that not all books will be accessible to the blind. We asked Amazon about this, but did not receive a response by publication time.

Because more and more institutions are considering switching over to e-book readers in the coming years, accessibility will remain a sticking point until the devices become more universally useable. Though Amazon's e-book reader isn't the only one on the market, it's certainly the most prominent at the moment. 

Further reading
•Case number 2:09-cv-01359-GMS in the District of Arizona (Phoenix) (pacer.psc.uscourts.gov)
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