There is no receive-one-free-ebook promotion with the purchase of a Kindle, either. I am still not certain how to download ebooks. None of those processes were intuitive or easy. He came over and helped me figure out how to use my Bluetooth headphones to turn on the Kindle ereader, charge it, and download two ebooks, 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII and A London Year – 365 Days of City Life in Diaries, Journals and Letters. So I phoned my brother, an IT support staffer for a parish school system here in Louisiana. Sighted help needed: Why couldn’t Amazon let me do this on my own? There was so much information and so many links. Then I visited an Amazon accessibility page mentioned in the show notes. I located a podcast I’d heard about earlier, Eyes on Success, which featured an interview with Peter Korn, accessibility architect at Amazon.
Without a Braille guide to help me master the Kindle, I Googled hoping to find information online. Amazon’s Kindle page for the basic model could also have identified Bluetooth headphones that would be especially blind-friendly. Third-party publishers do a great job for purchasers of Apple devices. When blind people or their friends log on the Amazon site and order Kindles with text to speech, they should be able to buy Braille guides that explain TTS and the devices in general.
Ideally I would not even have had to go online for the information. I would find out about the above Web pages only much later after David Rothman, TeleRead’s publisher, Googled around (far simpler for a sighted person to do). Simple instructions could have pointed to a list of VoiceView gestures for the 8th generation Kindle on the Web, as well as guidance for using Bluetooth headphones.
My Kindle arrived several weeks ago without information in Braille. Unfortunately this typifies Amazon’s seeming lack of understanding and empathy in considering the needs of blind people. Just how can we benefit from the built-in audio VoiceView tutorial and related guidance in the already-loaded users’ guide if we don’t know how to use the screen reader in the first place? You must drill down too far in the menus to reach text-to-speech features. But there is an ugly Catch 22 for blind people. It brings back the text-to-speech accessibility that had existed in older versions. TeleRead asked me in July if I would consider reviewing the recently released $80 basic Amazon Kindle. But I hold a masters degree in library and information science and am comfortable with tech although I’m not a full-fledged expert. Also see TeleRead’s Rx for the Kindle text-to-speech mess-to help blind and sighted alike. By David Faucheux, a freelance audiobook reviewer for Library Journal.
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