[Infowarrior] - Kindle 2 kill switches appear

[Richard Forno]

Kindle 2 vs Reading Disabled Students
By Meredith Filak, on May 13th, 2009

http://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/05/13/kindle-2-vs-reading-disabled-students/

[Update, 13 May: Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to  
disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been  
remotely disabled in over 40 works so far. Affected titles include  
works by Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and others. Other notable titles  
include Andrew Meachem's American Lion, and five of the top ten Random  
House best-sellers in the Kindle store. As a former English major, a  
teacher, and a lover of books, I can't see how anyone can justify  
eroding access to popular and classic literature.]

A little-known fact: in my non-IP life, I’m a bit of an education  
wonk. My mother was a high school English teacher for 30 years, and I  
work as a part-time SAT and Writing tutor. I specialize in working  
with dyslexic, ADD/ADHD, and other reading-disabled students–and so,  
on both personal and professional levels, I am appalled by the  
backwards approach to equal access espoused by the Author’s Guild  
during the recent Kindle 2 debacle.

While the Guild claims that they should have the right to selectively  
block the text-to-speech (TTS) function on the Amazon Kindle 2—due to  
the “added value” it automatically provides to their work—their  
response has served to do little more than exclude, alienate, and set  
back the reading-impaired community.

First, some background on the technology itself: Text-to-speech is a  
function, available on almost all personal computers for several years  
now, that translates written text into a computerized voice. (Put  
aside those images of Stephen Hawking and Speak-N-Spells; the voices  
are much softer on the ear nowadays.) The TTS function on the Kindle  
translates e-books to sound. The end result is of decent quality, but  
isn’t something you’d get particularly excited about.

TTS is not an audiobook. The quality is so disparate that I’d be hard- 
pressed to say they’re even remotely comparable. Audiobooks are  
performed and recorded by professional actors and sound technicians,  
and involve great expense on the part of the publishers. They are  
performance pieces, subtle, nuanced and genuinely entertaining. (The  
Harry Potter audiobooks are a phenomenal example.) The Author’s Guild,  
however, claims that the quality of TTS is improving so rapidlythat  
someday computerized voices could be on par with, or even superior to,  
professionally-acted audio books. Putting aside concerns about  
concerns about (as Cory Doctorow puts it) “the plausibility of the  
singularity emerging from Amazon’s text-to-speech R&D,” the claim  
itself is both legally and practically very shaky.

But wait, you say. So what? Who’s affected by all this?

Well, aside from a long list of people who, for one reason or another,  
cannot physically utilize books, those with text-based learning  
disabilities are left out in the cold.

Reading disabilities, particularly in youth and adolescence, interfere  
with nearly every aspect of education and often require prohibitively  
expensive tests to formally diagnose. (In the DC metro area, a full- 
spectrum learning diagnostic–often critical for securing standardized  
test accommodations–can easily cost over $2,000.) Uncounted children  
have to  cope daily with undiagnosed learning disabilities which  
manifest as vague, nebulous “difficulties” with seemingly disparate  
tasks. According to the International Dyslexia Association and  
Learning Disabilities Association of America, between 4-7% of all  
school-age children in the United States receive accommodation in  
school for a learning disability, and 85% of those students (5%  
overall) have a language-based disability. Estimates of prevalence of  
language disabilities in the general population can reach as high as  
an estimated 15-20% of the American population, and at least one study  
has estimated that as many as one in five children is dyslexic.

Reading disabilities, because of their tangible effect on textual  
performance, are usually the easiest for educators to identify.  
Unfortunately, they’re also among the first (along with ADD/ADHD) to  
be falsely and crassly dismissed as the hallmark of a “slow learner.”  
On the contrary, reading disabilities often mask otherwise brilliant  
mathematical, artistic, and analytical minds.

What most people forget is that, on a fundamental level, those with  
reading disabilities process language differently than a non-disabled  
reader. A student once explained his dyslexia to me with a familiar  
analogy; it’s like an older student learning a new language. Dyslexia,  
he told me, was like a new student translating a passage–a stop-and-go  
process of read-translate-integrate, which produces a string of words  
but no obvious coherent meaning. (Having taken Japanese in college, I  
found the analogy painfully effective.)

For this student and many others, text is quite literally another  
language. The simple option to have books read aloud to them—even by a  
computer—is an enormously powerful asset to those with a whole  
spectrum of difficulties, including dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, and linguistic  
impairment. English as a Second Language students (whose immersion is,  
often, primarily aural, and only later textual) also receive the  
obvious benefits of word-sound association.

Compounding this problem is the fact that reading disabilities last a  
lifetime.  In a longitudinal setting, text-to-speech offers an  
invaluable resource; TTS provides continual reinforcement, even as the  
subject matter or reading level changes. A Kindle with text-to-speech  
could provide a dyslexic child with a lifetime of reading assistance,  
opening them up to a whole world of literature and information.  
College students with textual impairments could access their textbooks  
in TTS format, providing a level of comprehension that they would  
otherwise only be able to achieve through a private human reader. We  
teach young children with technology designed to promote associations  
between sounds and printed words, but too often we overlook the value  
this same technology provides for adults.

But beyond the technical and educational debate, there exists a more  
fundamental, compelling reason to preserve TTS technology and protect  
its implementation. In the TTS debate, those with reading disabilities  
face not only a challenge to their ability to utilize technology to  
learn, but a fundamental challenge to their human rights as ensconced  
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 27 guarantees  
every human being “the right freely to participate in the cultural  
life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific  
advancement and its benefits.”

The Author’s Guild seeks not only to prevent further cultural  
participation by reading-disabled people, but also to deny them the  
benefits of scientific advancement by blocking an existing technology  
from performing its intended role—and doing all this while demanding  
remuneration for a capability they themselves have done nothing to  
promote. If this is how the Author’s Guild wishes to treat those with  
reading disabilities—as freeloaders attempting to abuse the “added  
value” of TTS—then I fear for the future of equal access.