Arizona State University Kindle DX discrimination lawsuit settled

TechCrunch is reporting that a lawsuit filed jointly by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) against Arizona State University has been settled.

In June of 2009 the lawsuit attempted to stop ASU from distributing the Kindle DX as a means of distributing electronic textbooks because the device cannot be used by blind students. According to TechCrunch, the crux of the argument was:

The main contentions in the lawsuit filed by NFB and ACB – which also targeted the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) – was that while the Kindle DX has a text-to-speech feature, the menus to select a book or purchase a book are not blind-friendly, making it impossible to select textbooks for download.

That tidbit surprised me, since I would imagine that satisfying the requirements of accommodation would include having braille textbooks available. The suit seemed to imply that the only substitute for a digital eBook was a blind accessible digital eBook.

In any event, they seemed to have settled out of court with Amazon apparently agreeing to help by making the interface of a Kindle DX more accessible to the blind.