Was there an actual commitment from Amazon that the pilot textbooks would have text-to-speech enabled? Unless you have that in writing, I would have to doubt it is the case.

My guess, until proven otherwise, is that the textbooks will be displayed as PDF, which will be easier for the publishers to provide than conversion to the Kindle’s format. So it may be a technical limitation that disables speech output.

Or, perhaps the files could be output as speech, but the publishers will discreetly leave that turned off, so as not to rock the boat at this time. But is is possible they will be speech-enabled – it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

What’s missing here is any notable statement from the colleges that are accepting Kindles for testing that accessibility was in any way a requirement, or even a concern. I honestly don’t know if they did or didn’t ask for accessibility features to be included, but I doubt it.

If the colleges, who serve students with disabilities, wont insist on accessibility, how much emphasis do we think technology vendors will give it?