Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, probably has a whole floor of people whose sole job is to read and selectively respond to the gigabytes of e-mail that he receives each day. And one of them decided to respond to my e-mail to Bezos extolling the virtues of my Kindle but pointing out that the accessibility could be improved. Here’s the text of the e-mail:
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Dear Mark,
I’m Allissa Bratager of Amazon.com’s Executive Customer Relations team. Jeff Bezos received your e-mail and asked me to respond on his behalf.
I’m happy to hear you’re currently enjoying your Kindle! We’re excited to offer these to our customers!
I’d also like to thank you for thoughts on creating a different page-turning feature. I’ll make sure your feedback and suggestions are passed on to the Kindle development team for consideration as we continue to plan new features and improvements.
Thanks for your interest in Amazon Kindle.
Regards,
Allissa Bratager
Executive Customer Relations
Amazon.com
It’s not exactly a pinky swear to build a more accessible Kindle, but at least Bezos’ minions decided that the issue warranted a vague nod of agreement. If a few hundred thousand people send similar e-mails to Bezos, Amazon might actually take the request seriously. Or else I’ll just have to set up a bunch of fake Gmail addresses.
That is great Mark. Sometimes these things just don’t seem to occur to those who design the devices. Kind of like the possibility of being left-handed didn’t occur to Apple when designing the iPhone 4. 😉 We need more attention paid to universal design.
A couple of weeks ago, I sent in three emails suggesting they add support for either basic voice commands or attachments such as switches, and got back two form letters touting the Text to Speech feature and one slightly confused original response. I do not think they understood what I meant by “accessible” or “quadriplegic”. Here’s hoping they took your suggestion seriously!