Syracuse University will no longer purchase Kindles for its students. That decision came after complaints from advocates for the blind poured in, the Daily Orange reports. The advocates claimed that the Amazon E-readers are inaccessible to blind students.
The Kindle is equipped with a text-to-speech feature that allows the user to convert the desired reading text into spoken words—which can be picked up with headphones—but in order to use that function, the user has to be able to navigate through the Kindle's settings to get there, the report says. Syracuse, which had orchestrated a partnership with Amazon to provide the E-readers, had purchased several Kindles and made them available in two campus libraries.
Amazon is in the process of creating a more accessible Kindle for the blind, the report says.
The University of Wisconsin will also stop buying Kindles for the same reason as Syracuse, according to a release from the National Federation of the Blind.
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