It has been eight days since Amazon announced Kindle 2. (Is that possible? It seems like weeks since I ordered mine!)

Text-to-speech – a new feature introduced with the new Kindle – has seen some immediate controversy, with the Authors Guild protesting that the verbal reading of a book by a machine is a copyright infringement.

That was quickly countered on Thursday by the National Federation of the Blind, which released a statement in support of “all technologies that allow blind people to have better access to the printed word, including the ability of devices like the Kindle 2 to read commercial e-books aloud”.

Decrying the Authors Guild position as “absolutely wrong”, NFB states that Amazon has “taken a step in the right direction” with Kindle 2’s text-to-speech technology. The statement also notes that the device itself cannot be used independently by a blind person, because of its visual controls, and urges Amazon to “rectify this situation”. (Read the NFB statement.)

This is reminiscent of a media briefing I attended in January, in which Stevie Wonder appealed for tech vendors to make technologies more accessible to the blind. He said that it has always “puzzled me how I can have access to some of those great technologies.”

Kindle 2 is not the answer to that, but it does seem to represent progress in the struggle for better accessibility for the visually impaired.

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Tags: Text-to-Speech