This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers and readers.
“People understandably have very high expectations,” Kurzweil said in an interview with Wired.com Thursday. “We believe Blio is very usable and has many features other book formats don’t. And there are many features that we want to add.”
In addition to bug fixes and other tweaks, an accessibility release scheduled for October 25 will work with Freedom Scientific’s JAWS, screen reader software for Windows specifically tailored for blind users. The 1.0 version released Tuesday relied on Windows’ built-in text-to-speech capabilities.