School tries e-books – and gets sued
October 30, 2009 by Tom D'AgostinoPosted in: From the Courts, In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Tech News
Electronic textbooks might be the next big thing. But until a few kinks get worked out, schools run the risk of getting sued by using them.
Arizona State University (ASU) participated in a trial pilot program that provided textbooks to students via the Kindle DX, which renders electronic books into visual text. The Kindle DX has a text-to-speech function, but there is no audio option for its menus and controls. As a result, it’s inaccessible to people who are blind.
The only classes that participated in the pilot program at ASU were classes taken by Honors College students. No blind students tried to enroll in any pilot course.
ASU student Darrell Shandrow, who is blind, claimed the pilot program violated federal laws against disability discrimination. Even though he wasn’t in the Honors College, he said he had the right to sue because the school’s use of inaccessible technology made him feel unwelcome and offended him. He also claimed he had suffered an economic injury, since the school used his tuition payments to support inaccessible technology.
The court rejected Shandrow’s claims on the basis that he lacked standing to sue. He did not identify any school policy that would impact him in any way, the court reasoned. And he didn’t have standing just because he paid tuition that helped fund the Kindle DX pilot program, the court said.
Cite: National Federation of the Blind v. Arizona Board of Regents.
Did the court get it right? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
Tags: Arizona State University, blind students, disability discrimination, e-books, Kindle
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October 28th, 2009 at 9:40 am
The court was correct. If it leaves trial, then they will need to address this and other accessibility issues before making it available to the full school. Using printed texts, which is the same as e-books, raises the same issue and isa addressed in the same way: with alternate methods of access to the information suitable to the disability. And, as e-books may save money, more funds would be available for other items such as accessibility.
October 28th, 2009 at 9:42 am
no story here
October 28th, 2009 at 9:46 am
The court is absolutely correct. A pilot is just a way to evaluate the programs for possible future use. In no way did the institution intended to exclude anyone. The purpose of a pilot program is to identify all the positive and negatives of a project…
We live in a sue happy society!! This gentleman is suing the institutions because he feels that if I can’t get the full use of a project, then it is not good for anyone else…
October 28th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Court ruling presents two (2) problems:
1-Every faculty, staff and student has the standing to sue, providing they present their case accrodingly.
2-Pilot/project programs are just as liable and responsible as permanent programs. Their use of institution funds, labor and time put them at peer level. A pilot program may be more easily disbanded but its initial substantiation and approval to move forward are based on a majority precentage percetion that they will, indeed, become fullyfunded and/or permanent.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:15 am
The court is correct. Not only is he not affected, most schools offer some sort of disability services that would be able to convert any text needed for classrooms for this student to speech. I am certain the the University that I go to offers it. So they would be able to provide him the books or ebooks on to recorded media for this person.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:30 am
You don’t know how that particular blind student felt, so I feel it’s unfair to judge him that way. Maybe he tried to get the college to listen about the potential negative and they consistently ignored him. That might have been his last resort. Or maybe it was his first response – we don’t know.
I’ve seen so many places that pay very little attention to our students with disabilities unless they raise a fuss. In my own dorm when I was in college, RAs on my floor would post notices on a blind students door – and they knew she was blind. If you’re not disabled, you’re not thinking about how a change might affect disabled students. So I for one am glad that he brought the Kindle lawsuit, if for nothing else than to raise the awareness. I’m just sorry it had to come to that.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Yes, the court was correct. As has already been mentioned, Mr. Shandrow has many options available to assist him as he pursues his education.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:51 am
I believe the court used some good old common sense in applying the laws of the land. I’m appalled at the frivolous lawsuits being used to waste the taxpayers money. This was one of those wasteful lawsuits.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:53 am
The court is correct. Yes, it is true that the majority typically has a blind spot, no pun intended, to the needs of others. This is, unfortunately, human nature. However, public institutions make means of access available once they realize the need and most individuals in them are aware of the need to do this as a matter of course. Had this man been enrolled in the pilot and requested access assistance, he would have been given that. Moreover, Arizona State would have then recognized the need for alternative access methods for the blind in this case and remedied the situation for the future. Had no such request been made, it is quite likely that AS would likely have implemented alternative access means, in any case, once the program left the pilot stage.
Also, in this case, no injury was intended and no actual injury was received. If this man’s feelings were really hurt, he needs to get over it. Surely everyone regrets that he is blind; however, the world does not owe him anything just because of that. Suing is no way to put oneself into the good graces of people who intend no harm. Quite the opposite.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:03 am
It’s a pilot for a reason. Now they’ve identified a problem with the program, so they either address the problem or they don’t move forward with it. That’s how a pilot works. I guess Mr. Shandrow would prefer his school never tried anything new.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:10 am
I believe the new version of Kindle will read text aloud. If that is so, it is an improvement over a print textbook for sight impaired students. Mr. Shandrow should welcome this, not sue.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:33 am
What concerns me is that this type of lawsuit really weakens the cause of the minority community in question (in this case, the blind). It amounts to a nuisance suit — no matter the standing of the student vis-a-vis the University previously, it seems to me that he has chosen the wrong venue to make his complaint more public, and in doing so has missed the point completely about electronic books.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
After reading some other stories this seems more like a case of the student trying to use this as a way to pressure Amazon to make the Kindle more accessible than it is about this student somehow being discriminated against. The student wasn’t even in the honors college, and thus couldn’t even take this class if he wanted to. There has, however, been a large community of blind people who are miffed at Amazon for not extending its device functionality to make it more accessible.
ADA guidelines do not stipulate that every student must have the exact same exact learning experience, but that disabled students have support services in place to help them with any needs they may have. If the logic that propelled this student to bring his lawsuit were applied to other areas, we wouldn’t have whiteboards, because blind people can’t see them. In reality, had this student been in this course, they could have easily gotten a braille version of the hard copy book, or found other ways to supplement his needs and make his experience comparable to his fellow students. There is always a way.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
The court is correct. There is no scientific way for one human being to concretely predict how another human being will feel in a hypothetical situation. The university cannot be held liable for not being able to predict that one of its students would be displeased about some aspect of its pilot program. The fact that that student has a disability does not alter the case: predicting human unhappiness accurately, and being held responsible for it in all hypothetical possibilities is unreasonable to expect.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Shouldn’t the student be turning his suit to Amazon, not ASU? Granted, taking on ASU might be just slightly easier than giant mega-retailer Amazon, but still. He sued (or attempted to sue) the wrong entity, IMO.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I abhor the very thought of replacing paper books with electronic versions. We spend far too much time in front of digital images which are not good for our eyes and may be unhealthy in other ways. The Kindle is not easy on the eyes. I am sorry to see schools even consider it.
That said…
The court is correct to protect equal rights for disabled people.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
The technology displaced by the Kindle (i.e., traditional textbooks) is also inaccessible to the blind. By Mr. Shandrow’s logic, it seems, any activity or pursuit not readily accessible by blind persons should be disallowed. That would create a patently absurd situation. Thank goodness some courts still demonstrate common sense.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
I am really getting tired of the excuse “it offends me” or “it offended me” as a reason for any argument whether it be legal or just a social issue. If something offends me, I remove myself from the offending situation and do not put my self back into that position. Yes there are offensive things in society but that does not mean that we have to regulate all of them out of existence.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I would agree with the court saying it has no merit. Although there is no text-to-speech available for the blind, in order for this to move from project / pilot, this should have been disclosed with Office of Student with Disability with a disclaimer “pending future enhancements to OSD/ADA requirements” to avoid any backlash. He may have merit to kill future funding or block funding until text-to-speech is available on Kindle.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Finally, a judgement for “our side”. I am tired of these courtroom OSD/ADA muggings for cash. There are so many wonderful technologies that we are afraid to bring to our students because of just this kind of lawsuit. I have had students demand a particular high-priced accommodating technology, but I have fought them every time by demonstrating that the cheaper technology works just fine for their needs. The government gives them money to attend school, but doesn’t give the universities money to accommodate them.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I just recently found out that my son’s school was given copies of their books on CD. I signed a contract (promising to return the books or pay $$$$) took the CDs home and now my son won’t get scoliosis from carrying a 20 pound back pack home every day.
Forget the Kindle, just buy a cheap laptop, for about 25% more, and use a book on CD. You can also write your papers on the laptop as well. The Kindle is way too expensive for what little it does.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Looking around even more, it appears that this group National Federation of the Blind has recently put out statements about the decision by the Author’s Guild to stop Kindle from even being able to read text at all. Amazon compromised by allowing authors to prohibit text-to-speech on individual titles.
So, I mean this is just speculation, but it may be that National Federation of the Blind heard about this pilot project with Kindles somehow, and then decided to contact a blind student at the university to use in a suit against them in order to get even with Amazon for caving to pressure.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
The reason Amazon/Kindle is not named in the suit is because they were not involved in limiting the the text book options to only their device. That was the schools choice. There are “electronic Braille books”, or electronic copies of the text (provided by the publisher) that can use voice technologies. If there was a visually impaired student in the class, I sure one of these other methods could be arrange.
And the arrogance of wanting to be reimbursed for the university purchasing technology that HE could not use. What about all the technology the university purchased that only he could use and was of no use to sighted students.
OK, I’ll stop ranting now.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Just Mike,
Not to mention the student in question probably contributed less than a dollar total to the whole project when you do the math. So he’s suing for pocket change.
October 28th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Finally, an application of common sense. I agree with Mike, it was arrogant to sue for reimbursement of his money for technology he can’t use. The court was absolutely right, we can’t continue to cater to the individuals and not address the needs of the majority. There are only so many funds to go around, the school made a choice to address how to spend its funds for the greatest good. Depending on the results of the pilot study, they could require the students to purchase their own technology rather than providing it for the entire body.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
What made this guy file this suit? Did he file suit because printed books didn’t give him a differently-abled capability? Would he have filed suit if his printed book could talk to him? Probably not. So why would he file suit when he now has a tool that can read the book to him?
Last I checked, there is no audio option for a book to provide page and paragraph. But the interesting thing about the Kindle is that with a software upgrade, it probably could provide that capability.
I’m glad the judge threw out this load of crap.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
The court absolutely got it right!
October 29th, 2009 at 8:37 am
This is just another case of narcissism and entitlement gone amok. This court case cost real money that is now unavailable for the purpose of education. Our society has gone insane with the idea that everyone’s individual needs are more important than anything else. It nice to see the court system occasionally recognizes this insanity.
October 29th, 2009 at 10:38 am
This is just another case of the “suit craze” that has taken over sanity. This guy heard about the pilot program and thought that he could make money off of it. Cudos for the Judge in this case. In any pilot program, there are always going to be kinks and bugs. It’s not until the experiment is over and it’s ready to be implemented full scale that the moron should have tried to sue-NOT that he would have had a case anyway-he didn’t even qualify for the program!
October 29th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Court got it right. It’s ridiculous that the student even chose to sue.
Next up: he’ll be suing because the university uses lights in their buildings. Afterall, he can’t see them and he’s getting no benefit from them; his tuition squandered away on lighting.
Kudos to the judge for stopping the madness in its tracks.
October 30th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Assuming the school would have made a Braille printed copy of the text available to this student I if he had been eligible to take the class in the first place) with the same avaialability as it does other texts, the student has no standing. Isn’t it interesting he is not suing for being denied avaiability of honors coursework?
January 28th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
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