Thoughts on Assistive Technology

As a disabled technophile, my relationship with Amazon (and to a lesser extent, Apple) can only be described as a love-and-hate affair.   That does not mean I love apple more than Amazon, quite the contrary, I use Amazon far more than Apple. Apple has made their iPhone 4S accessible to the visually impaired, and I have seen with my own eyes, how a blind person can overcome touch screen with mixture of voice feedback (Siri) and voice command. Google Android has achieved more or less same level of functionality, so, today’s high-end smart phones, Android, Apple or Windows (for the adventurous) should be accessible for most visually impaired people. What about Amazon Kindle? As far as the E-readers go, the most accessible model for visually impaired remains, Kindle Keyboard 3G. Released in 2010, (the 6” model has been discontinued in 2013, while the DX 9” model costs $299) it is both textile and affordable, and the Neo-speech TTS voice engine combined with voice navigation made

Michele: Let us leave topic of whether the "so called rich" are more likely to go abroad, I'll come back to this point later. Let's consider your proposal and admit the ones most likely to succeed, (which is basically the German model, and also Ironic, because this model works in Germany precisely because the as a Social Democracy, Germany has achieved "the happy average) I am telling you, if this model is followed in South African context you, will be condemning millions of poor South Africans the opportunity of social mobility, for this very reason alone, unequal technological access...Consider the scenario of reading three chapters for the test next week:  Rich kids: Get picked up in a car, drove home, tell maid to make tea, take out the iPad, or Kindle Fire HD, download the entire book, (under 1 minutes using Fibre optic) drinks his tea, and put on the headphone, text to speech will read the entire 3 chapters in an hour, and he can repeat the process as much