There's a post over at GoodEreader, called The Vision Problem – Why eReaders Are Not Widely Adopted in Public Schools, in which it is claimed that the reason schools haven't adopted ereaders en masse is those awful disability-activist groups that insist that if there are two blind kids in a school who can't use a Kindle, nobody gets to have one:
Aside from the overt ablism--which I'm so not up to screaming about right now--the author is missing the point. Ereaders aren't avoided by schools because "whenever they try, advocacy groups representing disabled people shut them down," which is what the article says.
Ereaders aren't promoted in schools because ereaders are lousy for academic use. And all the new bells-and-whistles being added aren't helping that one bit.
( They are so lousy, I'm gonna have to rant about it under a cut tag. )
Honestly, you figure that the average school might have roughly one or two kids out of the entire student body that has severe vision problems. There is also a number of dyslectic kids in the school system too, you would figure that a few students would not limit wide-spread adoption. These few students are all represented by a number of very large organizations that take their rights very seriously. Last month the National Federation of the Blind filed a court motion against the Sacramento Public Library Authority because the library was lending NOOK e-readers preloaded with ebooks to its patrons.(Plz to ignore the grammar/spelling errors in the quote; not my fault.)
Aside from the overt ablism--which I'm so not up to screaming about right now--the author is missing the point. Ereaders aren't avoided by schools because "whenever they try, advocacy groups representing disabled people shut them down," which is what the article says.
Ereaders aren't promoted in schools because ereaders are lousy for academic use. And all the new bells-and-whistles being added aren't helping that one bit.
( They are so lousy, I'm gonna have to rant about it under a cut tag. )
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