[Trainer-Talk] Amazon Fire Tablet

[New Vision Tech Center]

Hey All,
Thought I'd let you know we bought a Amazon Fire Tablet for $49 to try 
out in the class room with the new screen-reader and zoom built in. You 
can enable it out of the box and it has a lovely tutorial as I believe 
was demonstrated on the Main Menu Podcast. Seems to work pretty well 
with books and their other apps. I haven't tried out email yet, but 
that's on the list. It came setup out of the box with my Amazon Prime 
account.

The gestures are very similar to that of VoiceOver.... Flick right and 
left... I really enjoy custom shortcuts like a few gestures that act 
like a back button and home button.
I haven't messed with the Zoom much but it seems pretty snappy. Over all 
its pretty impressive experience. You do get some ads that pop up or are 
displayed on the lock screen from time to time. But I think for an 
additional $20 you can disable those... Not sure if you can do that post 
purchase but I'd imagine so. The on-screen keyboard works well, you 
touch and lift to type the character... Sometime I have a little 
responsiveness issues or it seems its lost focus on the item I was on, 
when trying to initate a double-tap. But over all its been pretty 
fantastic. I had a student in today with an older Amazon Kindle Fire 
tablet and it was a dog.... the screen reader had some weird gesture set 
and didn't use a double-tap for activating items. And the broswer was 
completely inaccessible. Also no Zoom, so their making huge strides.

Rock on!
-David