No text to speech in Amazon’s new Paperwhite Kindles: Why? →
— ♣No matter what the explanation for The Great Muting, Jeff, I’d be grateful for your personal pledge that text to speech will be a feature of all future Kindles, including the basic models (apparently audio of any kind was also missing from the the bottom-of-the-line Kindle introduce last year, and is still AWOL from the $69 successor).
A good sentiment, and some excellent points in this piece. It’d have even more of an impact if Rothman had made note of Amazon’s seemingly stubborn insistence to keep accessibility out of their Kindle apps on Apple platforms. Baking in VoiceOver support in iOS would entail a fraction of the costs involved in including speakers and TTS in Kindle devices. If they can’t be bothered to devote a few resources to the comparatively simple task of making their apps accessible, why on Earth should we expect they’d make their hardware so?