There's no money in accessibility. Drop accessibility, lose 1% users. Drop publisher x, lose 10% users. Easy decision.

if the ADA doesn't already cover this, we need to amend it to mandate accessibility. at least for businesses at Amazon's scale.

Roughly 15% of people are dyslexic. Kindle could actually sell substantially more books if they implemented dyslexia-friendly accessibility features.

In many cases, it’s not about the users you’ll lose, but the ones you’ll fail to gain.

Kindle supports native text to speech.

I have minor accessibility issues. Kindle has been a godsend: large text, extra spacing, heck I could view one word at a time if I wanted.

Complaining about the Cloud Reader when you have an accessibility superstar in the tablet seems a bit weird.

The Alexa app is great for having books read aloud. But many dyslexic readers don't want TTS — they want to read visually. And the app does have some accessibility settings (or rather, usability settings that are particularly helpful for dyslexic readers).

But there are many other types of assistive technologies out there, including some that are life-changing for all kinds of readers with disabilities. By making the platform inaccessible to browser extension, Amazon has created a situation where their in-house accessibility options are the only ones that can be used. For someone who has accumulated a library over a long period of time, on the understanding that the KCR supports browser extensions, it's pretty lousy to have the rug pulled out with no recourse.

There are some great people working on accessibility at Amazon, and I'm sure this is frustrating for them. But it's not unique that the accessibility team doesn't have as much power as another team — I see this at all sorts of companies, including pretty much all FAANG.