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The next wave of textbooks will be downloadable and easy to carry.
This summer Kindle DX came out with adaptable textbooks for everyone, including people with visual impairment.
From experts in the field of adaptive technology for people who are blind and visually impaired, the reviews of Kindle DX are mixed. They hope improvements are made to accommodate different levels of vision impairments.
Hadley School for the Blind in Winnetka provides educational services to people who are blind and visually impaired all around the world. Students don't come to school, they are taught by phone and computers using standard textbooks.
A devices like Kindle DX would be ideal, says Andre Lukatsky, director of computer services.
"The benefit of the DX is the large screen and gives someone with low vision access to large print materials," he said. "It's not good for people who are completely blind because the user interface doesn't speak; it doesn't have text to speech for the features in the menu. It doesn't allow a person who is blind to actually select a book through speech access."
The Kindle DX is light weight, larger than eBook, has an 18-point font and can be underline, which is essential for textbook usage.
Text to speech is also available.
The cost is around $500.
Allen Maynard is an access technological specialist who is legally blind.
"It's really a nice device. It's just unfortunate that being blind, I really can't use it because it reads the books but the menus don't talk and the control buttons aren't labeled they're not textual," Maynard said.
However, these experts believe there is a great future for Kindle DX. "If Amazon can add just few more features to the Kindle if Amazon can make the menu speak so that a blind person can actually navigate the books and download the book without sited help," Maynard said.
For students like Jacqueline Anderson, the Kindle DX could be on her holiday wish list.
"I would want it to be able to read books and to be something that I could use easily. One of the most difficult things with technology for a person with visual impairment is that it would be fully accessible," said Anderson.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From WLS-TV in Chicago:
