For years, the National Federation of the Blind has been pressuring Amazon to make its devices and apps fully accessible to the blind. They even staged a protest outside Amazon headquarters three years ago.
Now, the organization says it’s reached an agreement to work together with Amazon to make sure blind students are able to fully use Kindle content.
“We’re going to have regular meetings with Amazon about these matters and we have a forum to give Amazon feedback and escalate issues that we’re concerned about,” said Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind.
Danielsen says his group wants to make sure that blind students can easily jump back and forth between pages and access footnotes in the same way that other students can.
Amazon has been taking steps in recent years to improve accessibility of its Kindle products. In 2013, the company made it possible for people reading Kindle books on their iPhones and other Apple devices to convert text into speech.