About 1 billion people around the world live with disabilities, which is why we strive to build technology that works well for everyone. We start by building with and for people with disabilities, and our goal is for all customers to know how they can use their Amazon devices in their preferred way—to be connected, entertained, and independent.
Did you know you can interact with Alexa via touch? Or that you can connect compatible hearing aids to your Fire TV? Keep reading to learn about some of the many accessibility features built into Amazon devices.

Page overview

Making Alexa accessible beyond voice

1
Making Alexa accessible beyond voice
2
Expanding entertainment capabilities
3
Simplifying the out-of-box experience
4
Helping improve focus while reading
1.
Making Alexa accessible beyond voice

Tap to Alexa enables customers to interact with Alexa via touch instead of voice, and the feature is available on Echo Show and select Fire tablet devices. Customers can use Tap to Alexa with a compatible Bluetooth switch to navigate and interact with their Fire tablet. The feature can be helpful for individuals with limited mobility.

Customers can also use a new Text to Speech function, where they can type a phrase on their Fire tablet and then tap an icon to have it spoken out loud. This can be helpful for people with speech disabilities or unique voice patterns, or for people who are nonverbal or nonspeaking.

2.
Expanding entertainment capabilities
An image of an accessible feature for Amazon devices

Select Fire TV devices now support Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids (ASHA), making Fire TV the first-ever streaming media player to support ASHA and allowing customers to directly connect compatible Bluetooth hearing aids. Research showed that improving TV sound quality was one of the most requested features among hearing aid users, inspiring our teams to build this capability.

3.
Simplifying the out-of-box experience

Customers who purchase Echo Frames (2nd generation) will find an in-box card with braille text pointing them to our Echo Frames user guide, which includes directions on how to set up Echo Frames. The information is screen-reader-friendly, which can be helpful for people who are visually impaired or blind. The guide includes digital versions of the in-box documents with image-to-text translations of all Echo Frames visuals. It also offers information about device usage, accessibility-related features and functions, how-to instructions, and more.

4.
Helping improve focus while reading
Hands holding a Fire tablet HD 10 displaying a page from the Pied Piper with Reading Ruler turned on.

Kindle offers Reading Ruler on the Kindle reading app to help improve a reader’s concentration and focus by highlighting a book’s text, making it easier to follow along. Kindle includes many accessibility features for readers and authors, like the ability to customize font type, size, and boldness, control screen brightness, margins, and line spacing, and invert the background and text colors to create a more comfortable reading environment.

Want to learn more?

Check out Amazon’s latest accessibility videos showcasing how customers can use accessibility features across Alexa, Fire TV, Kindle, and other devices and services. Additionally, discover more about the accessibility features we offer.