Sign the Petition!

I got a new email from AHEAD today -- I signed the petition, you should too:

Good morning,

As you may recall from the summary e-mail message we sent you last week, AHEAD is one of the founding organizations who have joined together in the Reading Rights Coalition.

The Reading Rights Coalition is engaged in a campaign to obtain access for the blind and others with print disabilities to e-books available for Amazon’s new Kindle 2 e-book reader. The new reader, which Amazon is working to make fully accessible, has the ability to use text-to-speech to read these e-books aloud; but under pressure from the Authors Guild, Amazon has announced that authors and publishers will be allowed to disable the text-to-speech function. Over 25 organizations have joined to form the Reading Rights Coalition, which has set up an on-line petition to urge the Authors Guild and Amazon to reverse course.

Please visit www.readingrights.org to learn more about the work of the coalition, to read the Open Letter to Authors, and to sign the petition. Additionally, an informational picket will be held in front of the Authors’ Guild, 31 East 32nd Street in Manhattan, tomorrow, April 7th from 12:00 to 2:00 pm.

Signing the petition prior to the end of the day today [4/6/09] will be particularly helpful.

Please note: If you are using screen access technology, the first three fields on the form to sign the petition may not be announced. They are, in order: (1) a drop-down menu from which to select your prefix (Mr., Mrs., etc.); (2) an edit field for your first name, and (3) an edit field for your last name. The rest of the fields should announce themselves as you tab to them.

Thank you for your participation in this important effort!If you have questions about this topic, or the efforts surrounding it, please feel welcome to contact either of us directly.

Mike Shuttic, AHEAD President
m.shuttic@okstate.edu

Jim Marks, AHEAD President-Elect
Jim.marks@umontana.edu