Yesterday, Amazon announced their new phone, which they are calling the
Fire Phone. I won't go into all of the details about the new product,
as you can easily read more about the phone on tech sites such as
Engadget, CNet, etc. To summarize, it is essentially running a modified
version of android and, like the Kindle Fire tablets, has a variety of
built-in apps which allows you to access amazon's various services such
as Kindle books, music, video, etc. The question on my mind is how
accessible is the phone? while we won't know for sure until it gets
into the hands of visually impaired users, Amazon claims that it does,
in fact, contain accessibility features. They have a separate
accessibility page for the fire Phone at
https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=s_dp_acc_feat?ie=UTF8&docId=1002658171
After going through the list of features, it is a similar, if not
identical list to the one for the Kindle Fire tablets.
While I have gotten good use out of my Kindle Keyboard, most of you know
that I am now a dedicated Iphone user. I'm thrilled with Apple's
commitment to accessibility, as well as with all of the cool apps to
make a blind person's life more manageable. and I just think I'd be
disappointed going from an iPhone to a Fire Phone and so, for the time
being, I'm sticking with Apple. Still, it's nice to know we may yet
have another choice in the arena of accessible phones.

-- 
David Goldfield,


      Founder and Peer Coordinator,
Philadelphia Computer Users' Group for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Feel free to visit my new Web site
http://www.davidgoldfield.info/


    VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
Archived on the World Wide Web at
    http://listserv.icors.org/archives/vicug-l.html
    Signoff: [log in to unmask]
    Subscribe: [log in to unmask]