Kindle's text-to-speech feature, which reads digital books aloud, was supposed to be a plus for the blind and visually impaired. But the National Federation of the Blind last month slammed Amazon over the fact that there's no way for blind people to navigate Kindle's menu unassisted, meaning they can't buy e-books, select them for reading or activate text-to-speech on their own.

Now Amazon is looking to quell that criticism, announcing plans for new audible menu for Kindle next year, as well as a "super size font" for the visually impaired.

Here's Amazon describes the new features:

To make Kindle more useful for the blind, the Kindle team is currently working on an audible menuing system so blind and vision-impaired readers can easily navigate to books unassisted, in addition to listening to books as they can already do today with Read To Me. In addition, a new super size font will be added to Kindle, increasing the number of font sizes from six to seven. This seventh font size will be twice the height and width of the current largest font. These new features are scheduled for release by the summer of 2010.

The National Federation of the Blind last month said two universities, the University of Wisconsin and Syracuse University, which have been experimenting with the Kindle DX, are holding off on expanding their Kindle projects because of the blind-accessibility issue.

Amazon is pushing its larger screen Kindle DX with academia, trying to get universities to adopt the e-reader as a replacement for physical textbooks and course materials. The company has a number of pilots projects going on, including one at the University of Washington (see student reaction here).

The University of Wisconsin and Syracuse aren't part of the official Amazon pilots, but are part of a group of schools testing Kindle on their own. Still, their feedback seemed to get Amazon's attention.

Update: Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind, said the advocacy group is encouraged but taking a wait-and-see approach to Amazon's announcement:

We are encouraged by the press release issued by Amazon and hope that the rest of the industry will take note of Amazon's stated commitment to accessibility and produce accessible e-book and e-reading technology. Until we have seen the specific accessibility features Amazon is adding to the Kindle as implemented on the device, however, we cannot comment further.

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