Jennie Bourgeois

The National Federation of the Blind will announce today that Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison are holding off on expansions of Kindle offerings for students until the reading device is more accessible to the visually impaired, the Associated Press announced. “These universities are saying, ‘Our policy is nondiscrimination, so we’re not going to adopt a technology we know for sure discriminates against blind students,’ ” said a spokesman for the federation. While devices like Kindle have the potential to be valuable tools for the blind, the federation has said that the set-up currently used by Kindle effectively blocks access. A spokesman for Amazon, which produces Kindle, told the wire service that the company was working on improvements. The federation in June sued Arizona State University, saying that its distribution of Kindles to students discriminated against blind people.

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