Kindle Accessibility Reviewed

Thanks for the excellent, detailed review. I am happy to be wrong about the tts feature status showing up on book listings; that did not use to be the case. I have one question that wasn't covered in the review. Many publications have tables, boxes, insets charts and/or other devices that are intended to assist in data presentation, highlight certain information, present side bar info etc. Newspapers and magazines present information in columnar format, often discontinuously and also suffer from the same layout issues that I mentioned above. It often requires human intelligence to put this stuff together in a manner that makes it readable by somebody using tts; ocr doesn't always cut it in these cases. I'd be curious to know how the tts functions in such instances. Does it get reading order right? How does it do in a table? What about a text table or chart that has graphical arrows to assist sighted people in making connections between parts of the table the author wants to emphasize? It sounds like the Kindle is ok if you can deal with its tts and want to read novels and don't mind the other shortcomings discussed in the interview.

Anyone know, for sure, if publishers can remotely disable the tts of a book should they choose to? I've heard they can from tech pages, but not 100% sure if it's true. If it is, then being able to see if tts is enabled when you buy it won't mean much, as you may one day wake up and not be able to read that book you were half way through. Good luck getting your money back from Amazon, they're not too nice about refunds.