The NFB (National Federation of the Blind) praised two universities, Syracuse and U. Wisconsin, for rejecting the Kindle DX as suitable for students with vision problems. The suggested reason was recognition of discrimination concerning federal funding.

http://www.nfb.org/nfb/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=503

Another activist step is a Reading Rights Coalition objection posed to Princeton University.

http://www.readingrights.org/465

Then there’s a backlash injecting a yet unexplored assistive tech from Intel.

http://www.ireaderreview.com/2009/11/11/kindle-dx-universities-education-fiasco/

This article misconstrues the reading capabilities required for equal access to textbooks. The Kindle withholds essential access to menus via TTS that could provide comparable reading, buying, and interaction experience of students within the Amazon marketplace. Users of AT know well enough that voice-enabled interaction is within the realm of technology because we own such devices and use them routinely, albeit with different feature sets. The above article contends that accessibility advocates inhibit progress in eTexts which is quite true because the Kindle is deployed with deficient capabilities. that inhibit evolution of eTexts for everybody, which does include the many thousands of print disabled students, teachers, and other readers. The hand-held camer-based text reader is an important but separate technology that is still emerging, thus not expected within the current generation of Kindle readers.

C’mon Amazon, you can do it! I continue to buy from you because shopping, as in getting to stores or using multiple websites, is so frigging hard. But it really hurts to get that Kindle “we have a recommendationfor you” stuff before I search. Yech, gag, add to shopping cart, proceed to checkout,… well, maybe, not forever.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-Proclamation-White-Cane-Safety-Day-2009/

However, so much remains to educate people locally. I did my white cane tour of the Prescott downtown, with stop in line with trucks at talking ATM. Did anyone notice there was a visually impaired person making her way around the streets and crossings? A few, I hope, but I haven’t seen any local proclamations. Indeed, I asked the (soon to be ex-_ mayor about plans for White Cane Day andgot a “don’t keep track of dates” grumble. Well, so-and-so, that’s sad that a community aspiring to greater tourism and retirement quality can’t get up a sense of fairness and opportunity for visually impaired citizens. Public transportation, accessible cross walks, even white cane training itself — ah, it would be such an improvement to have these safety support services.

Do It Yourself Sputnik

describes the simple architecture of the satellite and compares with modern components and costs

Actually it exploits the analog to RSS in the domain of calendars, which is iCalendar.

This distinction is almost universally ignored, which is why although vast numbers of sites provide RSS feeds for event pages, those feeds are not machine-readable into calendaring software and services.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/blind_photographers/discuss/72157622124018136/