Amazon caves on text-to-speech, a loss for accessibility

March 4, 2009 by Noel Gomez
Filed under: General 

On my previous post I mentioned how the Author’s Guild was putting pressure on Amazon due to the inclusion of the text-to-speech feature in the new Kindle.  Amazon eventually backed down and is now allowing publishers to disable this feature on a per book basis.

This is too bad because not only did the industry not realize the opportunity they failed to capitalize on, but it also means that people who could benefit from this technology, namely the blind and visually impaired, also suffer.

As I mentioned before, no one who can read by sight would choose text-to-speech for their book consumption.  Not only is it slower to have something read aloud, but it is also not the best experience.

The following article on Slate is among the dozens which outline how poor text-to-speech really is and gets into detail on the technology and the fact that replacing human actors in audio books is still very far away.

Why computer voices still dont sound human. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine

Hopefully the industry won’t enforce the option to disable text-to-speech on their books because the only ones who would be hurt are the ones with no other options.

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One Comment on Amazon caves on text-to-speech, a loss for accessibility

  1. Apple takes advantage of accessibility and helps everyone in the process | Caldeas Blog on Wed, 11th Mar 2009 7:19 AM

    2. [...] will be even more so allowing Apple to explore these capabilities on the device. Apple, unlike Amazon and the Author’s Guild, today demonstrated how a company can embrace accessibility and not only help those in need, but [...]

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