You might, or might not, know much about a device called the Amazon Kindle. It is a hand-held gadget on which users electronically download and read books, magazines and other materials. (You may prefer traditional books and magazines, but technology marches on, so to each his own.)
But Kindles were involved in a bizarre dustup when a few universities around the country had some of their students use Kindles (strictly voluntarily) in lieu of their usual textbooks last fall. The idea was that the Kindle might be cheaper than regular textbooks and could reduce the use of paper.
Soon, however, the Justice Department started investigating. The department thought the schools were violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. That’s because even though a Kindle’s voice feature could read a book aloud to a blind user, starting a Kindle required some functions that were not readily possible for the blind. The Justice Department did not want universities sponsoring a program to let sighted students use the electronic books if the technology was not equally available to the blind.
This year, the schools reached a settlement under which they “agreed that until the Kindle was fully accessible, nobody would use it,” the Washington Examiner reported.
“We must remain vigilant to ensure that as new devices are introduced, people with disabilities are not left behind,” Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, recently told a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.
That is ridiculous. We don’t want anyone left behind, either, but it is absurd to say that rapidly developing technologies must be denied to some because they are not readily useful to all. That’s a recipe for bringing technological innovation to a halt.