The U.S. Justice Department today announced agreements with three universities over their use of Amazon's electronic reader, the Kindle DX. Under the agreements, Case Western Reserve of Cleveland, Pace University of New York City and Reed College of Portland, Ore., will not buy or promote the Kindle DX or other e-readers "unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision."

The three schools are part of a pilot group of seven universities that are testing the DX as a replacement for printed handouts and textbooks in classes.

Here's an excerpt from the Justice Department's statement:

Under the agreements reached today, the universities generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device.

The Kindle DX comes equipped with a "text-to-speech" feature that reads electronic books and other digital texts aloud in a robotic voice. But the "text-to-speech" function does not extend to the Kindle's menu or navigational controls, meaning visually impaired people can't buy e-books or select them for reading. That has raised the ire of national advocacy groups for the blind.

"Without access to the menus, students who are blind have no way to know which book they have selected or how to access the Kindle DX Web browser or its other functions," the Justice Department wrote, adding that the technology is available to create such voice control features. The agency said it reached agreements with the three universities under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Justice Department, the National Federation of the Blind, and the American Council of the Blind reached a similar agreement with Arizona State University earlier this month. Princeton University, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington are also doing official DX pilots. Alejandro Miyar, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment on whether the agency is in discussion with those universities.

The University of Wisconsin and Syracuse University, which have been experimenting with the Kindle DX outside of the official pilot program, have said they will hold off on expanding their Kindle projects because of the blind-accessibility issue.

Interestingly, while blind advocacy groups have slammed Amazon over Kindle's text-to-speech feature, saying it doesn't go far enough, the Authors Guild has criticized Kindle's text-to-speech for another reason: that it encroaches on audio books without compensating copyright holders. Amazon responded to that criticism by allowing authors and publishers to decide themselves whether to activate the text-to-speech function on book titles for Kindle.

Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX, the larger of its two electronic readers on the market today, in May 2009. The company has said it plans to update Kindle with new tools for the blind and visually impaired this year, including a new audible menu and "super sized font."

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