[Trainer-Talk] Kindle Fire Tablet/On Sale for $39.95

[David Goldfield]

The super-cheap version of this tablet, normally $50, is on sale for 
around $40 until February 13. It has a 7-inch display, two cameras and, 
even though it comes with 8 GB of RAM, is expandable due to the SD card 
slot. The reason I mention this is that the Kindle discussion list for 
the Visually Impaired, called Vi-Kindle, was inactive for what seemed 
like over a year but is now magically alive again, buzzing with 
messages. Originally, it was set up to discuss using the original Kindle 
Readers, particularly the Kindle Keyboard or the Kindle 3, which had 
some accessibility. I acquired one of these as a gift several years 
before I got my iPhone and I used that little reader constantly, as 
between it and Bookshare a whole world of books was open to me. When the 
new Fire tablets came out, accessibility on the tablets received mixed 
reviews and the readers began to be totally inaccessible. Between these 
events and the development of the iPhone app, it's understandable that 
interest from blind folks in Kindle devices began to decrease. However, 
all of a sudden it was as though someone flipped a switch and now 
Vi-kindle is alive, with people talking about how much they are using 
their Kindle Fire Tablets.
Here's what little I know, as I don't own any modern Kindle devices. The 
Kindle devices, while there are tons of them, can be divided up into two 
groups: e-readers and tablets. The e-readers are like the Kindles of 
old; their main function is to allow you to read books. Their online 
functionality is pretty limited; I think you can access Wikipedia and 
some of them came with an experimental Web browser but unlimited Web 
access is no longer available in these devices, a story for another 
message. Anyway, you can browse the online Kindle store where you can 
browse books to your heart's content and, of course, can buy as many as 
you want. Books are downloaded wirelessly in less than a minute, and 
some devices don't even require a Wifi connection, which is what made 
them so popular and so unique. These e-readers, as far as I know, have 
no accessibility at this time although some of them did, such as the now 
discontinued Kindle Keyboard model.
The Kindle Fire models are typical tablets, running a modified version 
of Android 5 or Lollipop as it's called. It has all of the reading 
functions found in the e-readers although you do need Wifi to make them 
work (some did come with limited cellular capability.) However, the Fire 
has a Web browser and can run other Android apps for mail, podcast 
listening and everything else you'd expect from a tablet. Amazon 
incorporated a screen reader into the KF, with the unimaginative name of 
Screen Reader. Screen Reader was a modified version of Talkback, the 
screen reader you normally use with Android devices. As I said, reviews 
on its performance were mixed and I got the feeling that blind people 
pretty much gave up on the Kindles, especially when the Kindle app for 
iOs became so accessible, along with iOS itself. I don't know if my 
perception was accurate but there are, apparently, some people who are 
reporting improvements in Screen Reader and one person on the list 
suggested to me that the reviews I had read about Screen Reader were out 
of date, an opinion I'm sure is valid considering how rapidly software 
changes these days.
Anyway, while I don't own a KF and so can answer hardly any questions 
about it I did want to let you know that at least some people are 
reporting good results with their Kindle Fire units and, if you were 
ever considering buying one, this might be a good time.
Incidentally, the Vi-Kindle group is also on Freelists.
To subscribe, I am assuming you send a message to
vi-kindle-request at freelists.org
and type
subscribe
into the subject line.


-- 
        David Goldfield,
Assistive Technology Specialist

Feel free to visit my Web site
WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info