Organizations representing people who cannot read print have joined together as the Reading Rights Coalition to ensure that the Amazon Kindle maintains its text-to-speech (”read aloud”) functionality. This critical function enables people who cannot access visual information to read books and other information available on the Kindle by reading through audible, rather than visual information. The Coalition, which includes the American Council of the Blind, the American Foundation for the Blind, the National Federation of the Blind and others, issued its first press release, reprinted below, on March 30, 2009. A list of coalition members as of March 30 is at the end of the release. More information at the Reading Rights Coalition website.
New York, New York (Mach 30, 2009)– New York City : The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd Street on April 7, 2009, from noon to 2:00 p.m. The coalition includes the blind, people with dyslexia, people with learning or processing issues, seniors losing vision, people with spinal cord injuries, people recovering from strokes, and many others for whom the addition of text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 promised for the first time easy, mainstream access to over 245,000 books.
The coalition includes: American Association of People with Disabilities, American Council of the Blind, American Foundation for the Blind, Association on Higher Education and Disability, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, Burton Blatt Institute, Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) Consortium, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), IDEAL Group, Inc., International Center for Disability Resources on the Internet, International Dyslexia Association, International Dyslexia Association––New York Branch, Knowledge Ecology International, Learning Disabilities Association of America, National Center for Learning Disabilities, National Disability Rights Network, National Federation of the Blind, NISH, and the National Spinal Cord Injury Association. In addition to the April 7 New York City protest, the coalition will participate in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on April 25-26.