Users with disabilities are fighting back against a recent attempt by the Authors Guild to shut down the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature.
About 300 people drawn from the National Federation of the Blind and partner organizations protested outside the offices of the Authors Guild in New York Wednesday in hopes of reversing the Guild’s stance. The Guild claims that the text-to-speech feature of Amazon’s new e-book reader violates authors’ copyrights.
But visually-impaired readers beg to differ. Kindle 2’s text-to-speech promises for "the first time easy and mainstream access to over 255,000 books," say representatives of the National Federation of the Blind and its partners. And, they say, the feature should remain in order to benefit users with visual and print disabilities.
Amazon offered an updated version of the Kindle e-book reader in February. The device came with a feature that would allow it to read e-books aloud
using text-to-speech technology. But the Authors Guild claimed the feature interferes with authors’ rights to read their book loud for audio books.
Amazon has since said that it will give authors and publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech function on any or all of their e-books available for the Kindle 2.
That has big implications for users with disabilities, says the NFB. "Print-disabled persons must either submit to a
burdensome special registration system and prove their disabilities or
pay extra for the text-to-speech version," says the group.
"Ultimately it is discriminatory for authors and publishers to charge disabled consumers more for an e-book than they charge the rest of the general public as the only difference is the method by which the disabled person will read it," says the NFB in a statement.
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Photo: Users Protest Outside Authors Guild Office in NY/NFB
