Hi, My wife has a Kindle and, despite the publishers refusing us access, it's actually optional for magazines and books to offer this. My wife has demonstrated the text to speech feature and it's fairly good. Many magazines and some books do still offer the speech option so know that once this change is made to the menus we will enjoy some of what is available.
-----Original Message----- From: macvisionaries+ow...@googlegroups.com [mailto:macvisionaries+ow...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Esther Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 1:29 PM To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Text-to-Speech Support on Kindle coming for Vision Impaired users Hi Jacob, Jake wrote: > But will we be able to actually read the books after the author's > guild basically said we have no right to and Amazon caved to them? It > can have all the audible menus in the world, but if I can't read the > book based on a licensing decision then it's still of no use. That's the next step! and I agree that I'd rather have an accessible iPhone app through Stanza. Cheers, Esther > Personally, I'd rather have an accessible version of the iPhone app > anyway. $400 simply for an Ebook reader is just too much. > Currently, the Kindle II has tts capability for books but only if > thepublisher allows it, and most do not thanks to the author's guild. > > Esther wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I'm surprised that I haven't seen any mention on this list of >> Amazon's >> announcement that they will update the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX to >> include an audible menu that will use text-to-speech and add new >> large >> fonts to better support vision-impaired users, and will implement >> these changes in 2010. This has been covered in a few places since >> yesterday. >> >> Here's the press release at Amazon: >> >> http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=136 2556&highlight= >> >> A few links to articles reporting on this: >> . Yahoo (basically the news release) >> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Blind-and-VisionImpaired-bw-2422175966.html?x= 0&.v=1 >> . Techflash (has some commentary from the NFB, student reaction, and >> other description) >> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/12/kindle_to_feature_new_tools_for_bli nd_visually_impaired.html >> >> and here's some of the older (November 2009) criticism of the >> Kindle's >> text-to-speech access from geek.com: >> http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/kindle-dx-text-to-speech-access-critici zed-20091111/ >> >> Cheers, >> >> Esther > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en > . > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionar...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
