Leading Blindness Organizations File Suit Against Arizona State University, Register Complaints with Civil Rights Divisions at Department of Education and Department of Justice, and Send Protests to Five Additional Institutions of Higher Education

The major blindness organizations, the ones whose membership consists largely of people who are actually blind and visually impaired themselves, the American Council of the Blind (ACB) and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), and Darrell Shandrow, a university student who is blind,  are suing Arizona State University (ASU)  for violating Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  In addition, ACB and NFB and Mr. Shandrow have filed formal complaints with the Civil Rights Divisions at the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, and sent letters of protest to Pace University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. The blindness organizations believe that the universities' participation in a pilot program which makes e-textbooks available for students to use with Amazon.com's Kindle DX discriminates against students who are blind because the e-book player is not accessible.

The Arizona State University administrators who decided to partner with Amazon.com  to make books from three major textbook publishers available on the Kindle DX, probably thought they were doing their students a big favor.  I imagine they were congratulating themselves for making life so much easier for ASU students:  It's much easier and quicker after all, to download a book using the Kindle DX's built-in cellular modem than it is to stand in long lines at the bookstore, or search at the discount web sites like half.com and EBay, or to rummage through those used books bins and shelves.  It's certainly easier on one's shoulders and back to carry around a 2-pound Kindle DX than it is to lug an over-stuffed backpack back and forth across the campus, and you don't need to find very much storage space in an already cramped dorm room for a Kindle DX, compared to what you'll need for the growing stack of hard-copy textbooks that accumulates with each passing college  semester.  E-textbooks are cheaper too.  And, you can use the Kindle Dx to download other kinds of information, including PDF files, newspapers and magazines, and all kinds of web content quickly and efficiently. Lots of students are probably thrilled to anticipate the several ways in which the Amazon.com Kindle DX will make their lives easier this coming Fall, and who doesn't like a cool new high-tech gadget to play with...?

One Arizona State student who is not thrilled about his university's participation in the downloadable textbooks project, though, is Darrell Shandrow.  Shandrow is a journalism major at Arizona State.  He says, "Not having access to the advanced reading features of the Kindle DX-including the ability to download books and course materials, add my own bookmarks and notes, and look up supplemental information instantly on the Internet when I encounter it in my reading-will lock me out of this new technology and put me and other blind students at a competitive disadvantage relative to our sighted peers.  While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible texts to be prepared for me, and these texts will not provide the access and features available to other students.  That is why I am standing up for myself and with other blind Americans to end this blatant discrimination."

It seems, in the summer of 2009,  almost incomprehensible that this situation was allowed to develop.  After all, Amazon.com's Kindle DX actually contains software that turns e-text into spoken words, and the civil rights laws that forbid discrimination against college students who are blind and visually impaired have been around for more than three decades.  

In early February, when Amazon.com announced that the next release of their e-book player, the Kindle 2, would include a text-to-speech capability, the excitement within the blindness and print-disabled communities was just about palpable.  Most of us have been accessing print information with our screen-readers and optical-character-recognition/text-to-speech systems like Open Book and Kurzweil 1000 and 3000 for many years.  Knowing that Amazon.com had more than 250,000 books just waiting for us to access instantly with the text-to-speech engine built right into the Kindle 2 was more than exciting.  How disappointing it was, then, to learn that although it is possible to enable text-to-speech on the Kindle 2, one has to be able to see the controls to actually do it, because the controls don't speak. People who cannot see a screen need audio information to select and download books, to know which book has been selected, what the configuring settings are and how to change them, and to navigate the on-screen menus. But, the Amazon.com e-book reader's controls are as silent as a page from a printed book.

The blindness community got busy and put together an online petition urging Amazon.com to make the Kindle 2 accessible.  The petition is still online at  http://www.petitiononline.com/Kindle2/petition.html, and there are currently 744 signatures there.

Amazon.com responded, after a fashion, to the collective urging of the blindness and print-disabled communities.  On March 19, in their official Kindle blog http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3LOIUHETXJZXJ?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0, they said, " We've heard from many of our blind or vision impaired customers who are excited about

Kindle 2's text to speech technology.  Some of these customers have asked that we make Kindle even easier for them by adding navigation accessible to the blind.  We want to let those customers know that this is something we are working on and we look forward to making it available in the future."

The blog is signed, "The Amazon Kindle Team."  I'm glad the team heard us and maybe even checked in at the site of the online petition to watch the online signatures mounting up, and I'm happy they are working on it.  I want to clarify, though, that it's not a matter of making the Kindle 2 even easier to use; it's a matter of making the e-book reader possible to use!

Fast forward now to May 6, just a few short weeks after the Team promised to work on making navigation possible for people who can't see the controls.  On May 6, Amazon.com released the next version of their Kindle, the Kindle DX.  That's the one that six universities are going to give to their students, come the Fall 2009 semester, for the stated purpose of assessing the role of electronic textbooks and reading devices in the classroom.  The Kindle DX is bigger than the Kindle 2, and the gray scale is better, and people who can read print are very likely to like the display better, but, and it's a big "but," the controls still don't speak!

It's hard to convince me that it's anything like rocket science to make the navigation controls and the on-screen menus speak, especially when text-to-speech is already built into and working on the device.

Now, let's talk about the universities who decided to become involved in the pilot Kindle DX textbook project.  It has been illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities who attend universities where federal dollars are spent for services and programs since 1973!  That was the year Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act became the law of the land.  Ever since, it has been, not merely wrong, but actually illegal to willingly exclude a person with a disability, like blindness, from a program or service that every other student can access.

I'm sure that Arizona State University, and the other schools that are involved in the pilot project as well, is an institution that receives some federal funding, but even if it weren't, even if ASU didn't take one red cent from the federal government, it would still be illegal for them to fail to accommodate Mr. Shandrow's needs, because the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was passed nearly twenty years ago, extends the protections granted to people with disabilities under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to every student with a disability at every university, and, actually, in every setting where accommodations are made available to the public.

It's been a long time since 1990, and even longer since 1973.  I'll bet every one of these universities employs staff members and operates a disabled students services office to assure that the needs of their students with disabilities are met.  And, in case someone in the administration might have suffered a momentary lapse and forgotten about the university's obligations to accommodate the needs of ASU students with disabilities, the Reading Rights Coalition which advocates on behalf of people with disabilities for everyone's right to access electronic information, http://www.readingrights.org/, reportedly wrote to ASU President, Michael Crow, "to explain why adoption of the Kindle DX without assuring accessibility for blind and low-vision students was a violation of the Rehabilitation Act and the ADA," but the university refused to stop the program. So, why is it, I wonder, as do the ACB, the NFB, and Darrell Shandrow, that Arizona State University, and the others against whom complaints have been registered, didn't feel compelled to take Mr. Shandrow's needs into account when they decided to participate in the Kindle DX textbook pilot project.

It is not comfortable to make waves.  It's hard enough to be a college student with a disability without drawing attention to that disability every time one encounters another instance of inaccessibility or discrimination.  It's expensive to file law suits.  And it's frustrating to find, nearly two decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed  and more than 35 years after the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 became the law, that people who are blind are still an afterthought in so many situations. 

"Oh," we hear when we attend meetings to which we were invited and for which we registered in advance, "I'm so sorry, we just didn't have the time to do the braille.

When I was in grad school ten years ago, the course materials for one of my required classes consisted of blurry photo-copied journal articles, collected over preceding decades.  "Oh," my professor said, "I didn't think about you..."

If it hadn't been for the kindness of a classmate who read the endless articles aloud into a tape recorder  and described tables and photographs, interpreted graphics and even summarized the gist of several long articles that said exactly the same thing, I would not have been able to access the materials, or to survive the class."

Why, in 2009, is Darrell Shandrow still an afterthought in the minds of administrators who decided to pursue participation in the Kindle DX textbook project?  When will it be no longer acceptable to say to people who are blind, "Oh, we didn't think about you."?

Amazon.com, who spent four years on the research and development for the Kindle e-book reader,  tells us they're still working on making the Kindle DX accessible and independently navigable by people who are blind and visually impaired.  ASU and the other universities who are getting ready to require students in certain classes to access their textbooks on the Kindle DX apparently haven't given any thought to Darrell Shandrow or other blind and visually impaired students, who pay tuition just like their sighted peers,  who might want to take one of those classes and download some of those textbooks.  When will people who are blind cease to be an afterthought?  Just how much longer will we have to wait for our needs, and our rights, to be taken into account?

The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prohibit the university from using the new Kindle DX e-book reader produced by Amazon.com, Inc., because it is not accessible to blind students.  Mitch Pomerantz, president of the American Council of the Blind, says, "ACB's involvement in this litigation is based upon our concern that to permit, unchallenged, colleges and universities to require students to purchase the Kindle in order to access all materials for a particular class is blatantly discriminatory toward blind and visually impaired students, and sets a dangerous precedent which other institutions of higher learning could choose to follow.

We must vigorously oppose any such initiative until such time as Amazon, Inc. begins manufacturing Kindle products with full accessibility.

To do anything less would be to turn our backs on the thousands of young blind and visually impaired men and women who are seeking to be productive, contributing members of society by obtaining a college education."

Congratulations to Mr. Shandrow, and to the two blindness organizations, to the Reading Rights Coalition, and to everyone who, I am confident, will work to rectify this discriminatory situation.  The ACB and the NFB do not always agree on issues that affect their blind constituencies, but when they can work together, as in this situation, their clout is likely to be considerable.  Let us hope that the universities, the federal agencies, and the team at Amazon.com will be persuaded that adopting a technology that excludes people with disabilities from full participation is discriminatory, and therefore intolerable, and building accessibility into the devices we need to use in our daily lives must be a priority, and is always worthwhile.  Let us hope that, because of the lawsuit, and the complaints, and the attendant media interest, at summer's end when the fall semester begins, Darrell Shandrow will be carrying around his Kindle DX, downloading books with ease and accessing study materials just as casually and just as efficiently, and at the same time, as his classmates at ASU who are not blind.