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The Kindle Cloud Reader used to display book text in the DOM. This was very helpful for people with disabilities who use browser plugins (like mine [1]) to get

The Kindle Cloud Reader used to display book text in the DOM. This was very helpful for people with disabilities who use browser plugins (like mine [1]) to get accessible access to their Kindle books. A couple years ago, Amazon "upgraded" their Kindle Cloud Reader so that it now displays images of text, instead of the text itself. This is of course a huge step backward in terms of accessibility, and we heard from joint users who were upset to no longer be able to access their Kindle books in ways that were easy for them to read. For some people with disabilities, this move essentially 'bricked' their Kindle library. My guess is that they did this for anti-piracy reasons. But how effective can this be? It's not like people can't use OCR to capture text from the new image-based platform. Hell, you can even point your iPhone at a computer screen and capture all the text. And once one person has pirated a book, it's game over. I don't understand how they think they'll 'win' this game of cat-and-mouse. Are they just doing this stuff to appease publishers? Are they willing to sacrifice accessibility for this Sisyphean attempt to quash digital piracy? I understand both sides of the argument from a theoretical perspective, but I don't get how this is supposed to work on a practical level. 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifjafammaookpiajfbedmacfldaiamgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

apigalore 4y ago
Definitely publisher asked them to do this.
- sterlind 4y ago
  you'd think Amazon would have to at least pay lip service to accessibility, at the scale of that company. it's infuriating that they don't seem to care.
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    There's no money in accessibility. Drop accessibility, lose 1% users. Drop publisher x, lose 10% users. Easy decision.
    - sterlind 4y ago
      if the ADA doesn't already cover this, we need to amend it to mandate accessibility. at least for businesses at Amazon's scale.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      Roughly 15% of people are dyslexic. Kindle could actually sell substantially more books if they implemented dyslexia-friendly accessibility features. In many cases, it’s not about the users you’ll lose, but the ones you’ll fail to gain.
      - pyuser583 4y ago
        Kindle supports native text to speech. I have minor accessibility issues. Kindle has been a godsend: large text, extra spacing, heck I could view one word at a time if I wanted. Complaining about the Cloud Reader when you have an accessibility superstar in the tablet seems a bit weird.
        gnicholas 4y ago
        The Alexa app is great for having books read aloud. But many dyslexic readers don't want TTS — they want to read visually. And the app does have some accessibility settings (or rather, usability settings that are particularly helpful for dyslexic readers). But there are many other types of assistive technologies out there, including some that are life-changing for all kinds of readers with disabilities. By making the platform inaccessible to browser extension, Amazon has created a situation where their in-house accessibility options are the only ones that can be used. For someone who has accumulated a library over a long period of time, on the understanding that the KCR supports browser extensions, it's pretty lousy to have the rug pulled out with no recourse.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    There are some great people working on accessibility at Amazon, and I'm sure this is frustrating for them. But it's not unique that the accessibility team doesn't have as much power as another team — I see this at all sorts of companies, including pretty much all FAANG.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  I suspect it’s because they want to promote the text to speech feature in Kindle Fire.
techbozo 4y ago
To play the-devil-intepreted-through-the-lens-of-poorly-constructed-web-apps advocate, they may have switched to rendering text in a canvas element (not saving and serving images of text) because... Web Developers. I've done it before (sorry).
rektide 4y ago
There's a bunch of interest in doing this widely to a huge part of the web. Removing all (almost all) HTML/DOM & using WebGL or WebGPU, having the page load a big wasm rendering engine & doing all the interactivity through that. The original Hixie (former editor of HTML5) manifesto/proposal even included using WebUSB to talk directly to input devices!! Flutter/CanvasKit[1] & Ian Hixie[2] are actively pursuing/shipping this. There's a blog suggesting Jetpack Compose goes this route[3]. Seems like interest is going to keep growing. These folks say they are just doing it so developers can build "pixel perfect" apps, but oh, it also coincidentally means users have no control or say in the pixel's as they'd prefer them. Not everything written will necessarily be as Lawful Evil/impedeing-basic-human-use as what Amazon is up to here, but it'll be up to each org & each dev what pixels on the screen are interactable how. One huge nightmare/opaque infernally damned shitworld. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980 [2] "Towards a Moderm Web Stack" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779746
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Google did it to Docs also, with the same effect. They had even received letters from the Disability Services Offices at leading/large universities, including Stanford, asking them not to. Ironically, my plugin still works on Docs...but only on comments. The body text is untouchable.
  - Tyr42 4y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on docs. I thought docs was working? At least in Mac's voice over on a laptop. There's also a menu setting to turn on more accessibility things. Not sure what that actually does though. But as of December VO could read the body text.
    - rektide 4y ago
josephcsible 4y ago
Why does the ADA not let Berkeley publish free course videos without captioning them, but also let Amazon get away with that kind of behavior?
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  Lobbying.
hourago 4y ago
> it now displays images of text, instead of the text itself. This is of course a huge step backward in terms of accessibility, Accessibility needs to be regulated. In UK accessibility is well regulated for public websites: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-p... If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live. > But how effective can this be? As you point out it will not stop pirates.My guess is that they implement the feature, piracy goes down the week it is released, and everybody gets a bonus. In less than a month piracy is up again as they develop new tools, and people with disabilities lost access to it. But it is too late. Accessibility in websites need some kind of evolutionary pressure to exists. Otherwise change after change it disappears. And the population that needs this features to have normal lives is not large enough to create an economic incentive.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- skissane 4y ago
  > If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live. Years ago, I worked for a university. We were implementing Netscape/iPlanet/Sun email for students. The webmail was not accessible. The director of our disability services office was blind, (she was both a full-time staff member and a part-time student) and she complained it was unusable for her. Sun told us “accessibility is coming in a future version”. What did we do? We gave her a shell account with Pine, and told her we’d offer the same to any other student who couldn’t use the webmail due to disability. She was happy with that outcome. Similarly, suppose someone like Amazon provides a non-accessible privacy-resistant service, and then offers users with proof of disability an alternative service which is more accessible but less privacy-resistant - depending on the details and the jurisdiction, that might comply with disability discrimination laws.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    So you think a person needs to be officially labeled as disabled before they're allowed to use screen readers? Personally, that doesn't bode well for my deteriorating eyesight, which is still very far from disability, but already at a level where audiobooks are easier than real books.

apigalore 4y ago

Definitely publisher asked them to do this.

sterlind 4y ago
you'd think Amazon would have to at least pay lip service to accessibility, at the scale of that company. it's infuriating that they don't seem to care.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  There's no money in accessibility. Drop accessibility, lose 1% users. Drop publisher x, lose 10% users. Easy decision.
  - sterlind 4y ago
    if the ADA doesn't already cover this, we need to amend it to mandate accessibility. at least for businesses at Amazon's scale.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Roughly 15% of people are dyslexic. Kindle could actually sell substantially more books if they implemented dyslexia-friendly accessibility features. In many cases, it’s not about the users you’ll lose, but the ones you’ll fail to gain.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      Kindle supports native text to speech. I have minor accessibility issues. Kindle has been a godsend: large text, extra spacing, heck I could view one word at a time if I wanted. Complaining about the Cloud Reader when you have an accessibility superstar in the tablet seems a bit weird.
      - gnicholas 4y ago
        The Alexa app is great for having books read aloud. But many dyslexic readers don't want TTS — they want to read visually. And the app does have some accessibility settings (or rather, usability settings that are particularly helpful for dyslexic readers). But there are many other types of assistive technologies out there, including some that are life-changing for all kinds of readers with disabilities. By making the platform inaccessible to browser extension, Amazon has created a situation where their in-house accessibility options are the only ones that can be used. For someone who has accumulated a library over a long period of time, on the understanding that the KCR supports browser extensions, it's pretty lousy to have the rug pulled out with no recourse.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- gnicholas 4y ago
  There are some great people working on accessibility at Amazon, and I'm sure this is frustrating for them. But it's not unique that the accessibility team doesn't have as much power as another team — I see this at all sorts of companies, including pretty much all FAANG.
pyuser583 4y ago
I suspect it’s because they want to promote the text to speech feature in Kindle Fire.

techbozo 4y ago

To play the-devil-intepreted-through-the-lens-of-poorly-constructed-web-apps advocate, they may have switched to rendering text in a canvas element (not saving and serving images of text) because... Web Developers. I've done it before (sorry).

rektide 4y ago

There's a bunch of interest in doing this widely to a huge part of the web. Removing all (almost all) HTML/DOM & using WebGL or WebGPU, having the page load a big wasm rendering engine & doing all the interactivity through that. The original Hixie (former editor of HTML5) manifesto/proposal even included using WebUSB to talk directly to input devices!! Flutter/CanvasKit[1] & Ian Hixie[2] are actively pursuing/shipping this. There's a blog suggesting Jetpack Compose goes this route[3]. Seems like interest is going to keep growing. These folks say they are just doing it so developers can build "pixel perfect" apps, but oh, it also coincidentally means users have no control or say in the pixel's as they'd prefer them. Not everything written will necessarily be as Lawful Evil/impedeing-basic-human-use as what Amazon is up to here, but it'll be up to each org & each dev what pixels on the screen are interactable how. One huge nightmare/opaque infernally damned shitworld. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980 [2] "Towards a Moderm Web Stack" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779746

gnicholas 4y ago
Google did it to Docs also, with the same effect. They had even received letters from the Disability Services Offices at leading/large universities, including Stanford, asking them not to. Ironically, my plugin still works on Docs...but only on comments. The body text is untouchable.
- Tyr42 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on docs. I thought docs was working? At least in Mac's voice over on a laptop. There's also a menu setting to turn on more accessibility things. Not sure what that actually does though. But as of December VO could read the body text.
  - rektide 4y ago

josephcsible 4y ago

Why does the ADA not let Berkeley publish free course videos without captioning them, but also let Amazon get away with that kind of behavior?

deafpolygon 4y ago
Lobbying.

hourago 4y ago

> it now displays images of text, instead of the text itself. This is of course a huge step backward in terms of accessibility, Accessibility needs to be regulated. In UK accessibility is well regulated for public websites: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-p... If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live. > But how effective can this be? As you point out it will not stop pirates.My guess is that they implement the feature, piracy goes down the week it is released, and everybody gets a bonus. In less than a month piracy is up again as they develop new tools, and people with disabilities lost access to it. But it is too late. Accessibility in websites need some kind of evolutionary pressure to exists. Otherwise change after change it disappears. And the population that needs this features to have normal lives is not large enough to create an economic incentive.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
skissane 4y ago
> If we do not do the same for all websites then people with disabilities will be kicked out of a normal live. Years ago, I worked for a university. We were implementing Netscape/iPlanet/Sun email for students. The webmail was not accessible. The director of our disability services office was blind, (she was both a full-time staff member and a part-time student) and she complained it was unusable for her. Sun told us “accessibility is coming in a future version”. What did we do? We gave her a shell account with Pine, and told her we’d offer the same to any other student who couldn’t use the webmail due to disability. She was happy with that outcome. Similarly, suppose someone like Amazon provides a non-accessible privacy-resistant service, and then offers users with proof of disability an alternative service which is more accessible but less privacy-resistant - depending on the details and the jurisdiction, that might comply with disability discrimination laws.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  So you think a person needs to be officially labeled as disabled before they're allowed to use screen readers? Personally, that doesn't bode well for my deteriorating eyesight, which is still very far from disability, but already at a level where audiobooks are easier than real books.