Amazon Announced today the number of new features for its Kindle app for iOS que aim to make it easier to use for blind and visually impaired users. Today’s update, Amazon says, will make it easier for these users to use features like “X-Ray, End Actions, sharing, highlighting and bookmarking.” Amazon says these new features are available on iOS today, but it plans to make Them available on additional platforms in the future.
These new features, the company says in today’s announcement, will give visually impaired users easier access to the more than 1.8 million titles in its catalog que feature its text-to-voice narration VoiceOver. The iOS app Also Allows users to read character-by-character, word-by-word and line-by-line and supports the usual iOS accessibility features like zoom, assistive touch and peripheral support for braille displays.
Overteam, Amazon has made its Kindle hardware and apps more accessible for visually impaired users. Last December, for example, added Voice Guide Explore by Touch and Kindle Fire to its HD. Still, the company has recently come under fire for not doing enough for its visually impaired users. Also in December, the number of blind users protested in front of the company’s headquarters to bring attention to the Kindle’s lack of features for visually impaired users. At the team, Dr. Marc Maurer, the President of the National Federation of the Blind, Argues that “Amazon has Repeatedly Demonstrated utter indifference to the recommendations of blind Americans for full accessibility of its Kindle e-books and failed to follow the best practices of other eBook providers. “
Introduced in November 2007, Kindle is an e-reader developed by Amazon.com to allow easy access to a vast library of electronic books to be downloaded and read on the device. Over 90,000 books were available for download at launch; que catalog grew to over 160,000 by August 2008 and was growing by over 25,000 titles per month. Books, newspapers, magazines and blogs are loaded onto the device wirelessly via Amazon’s free EVDO network (called WhisperNet) and are published in …
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