Webstandards, Accessibility and Usability at Penn State

With the release of the Kindle 2, Amazon has added new features and is promoting the Kindle’s use in the educational environment. The features and improvements may indicate some of this push is to get the reader in students’ hands. Features like highlighting and note taking seem to be more suited for the study environment than they are for the casual reader. According to BusinessWeek.com, Amazon has even partnered with six universities and major textbook publishers to provide students their own Kindle. This means that more and more college textbooks will become available in the Kindle format. A larger screened version called the Kindle DX has recently become available as well.

But what about accessibility? What have they done to aid universities in our efforts to provide accessible learning materials? Kindle still has the same great option of text sizes that can be changed for those individuals with low vision. One complaint is that the keyboard shortcut to pull up the text selection menu has no notch or bump to differentiate it from the other keys. The keyboard has been redesigned so that it is in a linear layout, but there are no notches or bumps to denote the “F” and “J” home keys. These are common features to any keyboard that are designed to help any user, not just visually impaired ones, to find the “home” keys without looking down at the keys.

Amazon offers the ability to have Word, PDF, and other documents converted into a format that the Kindle can display. To have your documents converted, you must e-mail them to Amazon, who will then e-mail them back to you in the converted format. Plain text (.txt) files can be placed on the device right from the user’s computer without any conversion. The new Kindle DX will have the capability of converting the files into the right format from the device itself.

Kindle has used technology from Nuance (makers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking) to provide text-to-speech in the newest installment of the device. You may be thinking, “Great, now students with visual impairments can simply have the text read to them without having to purchase a separate copy.” This is true; all books on the Kindle are inherently in an accessible format with this added feature. Even the plain text files that the user can add to the device on his or her own can be read by the text-to-speech function. There is just one problem. The text-to-speech only reads the books and text and will not read menu and navigation items. This means that a visually impaired individual attempting to navigate the device will need help from a sighted person. This is a major miss for Amazon when considering accessibility. To consciously work on a technology best suited for accessibility purposes and not make the navigation or menus accessible is disappointing, to say the least.

Fortunately, Amazon has heard the complaints of the masses on this issue and has announced that they are working toward a solution to make the menus and navigation accessible. At Penn State, we have purchased a Kindle 2 to pass around in exchange for user feedback with general and educational use in mind. Once we have received enough feedback, we will create another post as a follow-up to this one.

Michael Brooks
IT Consultant
Penn State World Campus

Twitter user name: UsableMike