Amazon unveiled a new blind-accessible Kindle this week, prompting the National Federation of the Blind to commend the Seattle online retail giant on the new technology.

The new model offers voice-guided menu options.

NFB officials praised the release and its accessibility improvements — but perhaps not surprisingly, the ever-revolutionary Apple had won the Baltimore organization’s heart years ago.

“Where we’ve had a lot of success is with Apple,” said Chris Danielsen, NFB’s director of public relations.  “Their accessibility is constantly improving.”

He cited the accessibility of the iPad since its release this year, as well as iTunes, the iPod and the iPod Touch.

NFB had encouraged Amazon before the first Kindle came out in 2007 to make the product blind-accessible.

“A few years ago we said [to Amazon] this could be really revolutionary,” Danielsen said.

Three years and a lawsuit later, they’ve done it.

The lawsuit, which was resolved in January, arose against Arizona State University because of its participation in a learning program that used the Kindle DX, which blind students couldn’t use.

The NFB and the American Council of the Blind said this directly violated federal law.  In the settlement, Amazon said it would make improvements to increase the Kindle’s accessibility.

So here we are. The new model, starting at $139, comes equipped with a voice guide that reads all menu options aloud, which it did not offer before. The Kindle DX had offered technology that could read texts aloud, but allowed no way to get there.

“Amazon hasn’t talked to us personally [about unveiling the new model],” said Danielsen. “We have worked with them on the accessibility of their Web site, though.”

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Well … on film anyway. I got you excited, didn’t I?

The Maryland Science Center is debuting a film next week called “Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk.” It features music by the ever-hip Dave Matthews Band and is narrated by the studly voice of Robert Redford.

The IMAX film “Under the Sea” also features a Hollywood star — Jim Carrey narrates this movie on Indo-Pacific waters.

The Grand Canyon IMAX 3D film takes viewers down the rapids of the Colorado River, surrounded by the breathtaking Grand Canyon. The Colorado has been the victim of historic drought threatening the lives of 30 million people who depend on the river’s water, according to the Science Center. The film is a visual treat for kids while informing viewers of the importance of protecting natural resources.

The film’s a little old — it was released in August 2008 and debuted in Washington at a film festival before the national release. But if you missed it — and chances are you did — you saved yourself the hour drive and $20 parking in downtown D.C. Once again, procrastination pays off. That’s a saying, isn’t it?

The film has also won a Giant Screen Cinema Association award for best cinematography and a Motion Picture Sound Editors award for best sound editing.

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As two Montgomery County residents who commute to Baltimore daily, we’ve attacked this week’s power outages in different ways.

Don’t get us wrong, we’re both steaming about Pepco’s slow return to service, but knowing their business a bit — and seeing all of the damage from the storm’s downed trees — has helped take off the edge.

So has working with A/C in Baltimore.

Here’s this week from each of our points of view.

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I guess when you think about it, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and New Jersey are pretty boardwalk-heavy compared with other U.S. shorelines … but we’ll take what we can get.

Especially when it means Maryland’s Ocean City boardwalk is rated by ShermansTravel as the fifth-best boardwalk in the country behind Atlantic City, N.J.; Coney Island, N.Y.; Kemah, Tex. and Mission Beach, Calif.

And Shermans is showing the love for the Del-Mar peninsula — right behind Ocean City is nearby Rehoboth Beach, Del.

Shermans cites Ocean City’s 2.5 miles of restaurants, night life, shops and amusements (especially Trimper’s Carousel, the country’s oldest continuously operating carousel) as its reason for the ranking.

In a statement, Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan said the boardwalk was one of the city’s most popular attractions and a “source of pride and heritage” for the town.

This is not the first time Ocean City has been nationally recognized for its boardwalk. In 2004, the Travel Channel recognized Ocean City as one of the “Best Boardwalks in America” and in 2005, USA Today placed Ocean City on its list of “One of the 10 Great Places to have Fun on the Boardwalk.”

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Hotels love ‘em. Gas station operators are big fans of the extra customers at the pump. But West Virginia, Delaware and Pennsylvania casinos, which I describe in today’s story about table games as “islands of gaming,” don’t have much of a direct impact on other surrounding businesses.

At the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races, the co-owner of the nearby Turf Motel is ecstatic about the new gaming that’s attracting more gamblers. That means more customers for the Motel, which is planning an expansion to accommodate the expected boom.

After the casino opened, the Turf’s occupancy rates shot up from about 45 percent to 65 percent, said Ron Marcus.

“With table games my only hope is it’s going to increase another 20 [points],” he said.

At the Holiday Inn Express, occupancy averages 90 percent on the weekends — at about $160 per night.

“Most of time what they’re here for is the casino,” said General Manager Nelson Parkinson.

But hop in the car and drive a half-mile into town and the businesses on sleepy Charles Town’s main drag seem unaffected by the excitement just up the road. Unlike the casino’s parking lot, the cars parked here all boast West Virginia license plates.

The storefronts are mostly service firms (like law offices), eateries and consignment shops. Not much to sway the casino crowd, who can chow down in one of Charles Town’s five restaurants or the food court for a bite. (The casino is also opening a high-end steak restaurant this fall.)

“I don’t get a lot of casino traffic,” said Dan Vaira, the owner of The Dish, a farm-to-table bistro. “They have food at the track.”

For a little further “investigation,” photographer Max Franz and I dipped into the new ice cream shop on Washington Street to go spoil our dinners. There we found people taking a break from work, friends chattering about their days, moms with kids … but no tourists. Except us, of course.

Table games? What table games?

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The Office of the People’s Counsel has a new website that they are touting as more friendly to the people they rep in utility matters — consumers.

The site gives consumers a list of energy providers with the essentials on their offerings: how much they charge per kilowatt-hour, the length of the contract, fee for canceling and what type of power they provide.

While OPC’s website is a good one-stop shop for consumers looking to compare deals, OPC warns that you should still check with the individual providers and read contract details before signing on with an energy company. Contract terms can change quickly, and you don’t want to get stuck paying for a service that you don’t like.

The site also includes a list of public hearings coming up at the Public Service Commission. I even noticed dates for a taxicab rate hike hearing that I didn’t know was coming up (August 2-4). There’s also a section on the latest news from the PSC. Consumers can see how the commission ruled and where OPC came down in support of customers.

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A Maryland business and a government organization have joined the app wave, creating iPhone/Pod/Pad applications for their various projects –- one for hurricanes, the other for video games.

They’re in good company: More than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store as of January.

Scientists at NASA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (a techy mouthful known as GOES) Project at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt have developed continually updating “movies” of tropical storm movement in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  The movies come from the project’s satellite imagery and are viewable online and on Apple products.

The GOES satellites offer views of Hurricane Alley just in time for storm season.  Affected locals and storm buffs alike can watch movies that use scans from the last three to five days, illustrating the storms’ life cycles as they develop.

As for video games, Game Trading Technologies Inc. in Hunt Valley has developed an app that allows video game players to build, value, manage and trade their personal video game software collections. GTTI has been around since 2003, and bills itself as a video game trading services provider –- valuing, revamping and redistributing pre-owned video games. Kind of like bargain hunting for gamers.

“GameBook Mobile” will have six starting features: Value My Games/Collection that allows the user to view games and their collective value as they’re added; Scan My UPC, which scans the bar code on the back of games; Trade Trend Key, which tracks the market values of games and the overall trends of the collection; Trade-O-Meter, which rates which games are keepers and which should be up for trade; and the self-explanatory Want List and Store Locator.

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Not shockingly, it’s really anybody’s guess as to how back-to-school sales will turn out this August. With the stock market and consumer confidence levels bouncing back and forth between the plus-side and the minus-side, it seems like a Magic 8 Ball would be just as good at predicting the retail future as a trained economist.

But here’s what the economists are saying this week: The International Council of Shopping Centers says this season’s sales (from mid-July to mid-September) will increase by 5.4 percent. That would be the biggest percentage increase (not dollar increase) since 2005, according to the ICSC. The council based its prediction on recent sales of family clothing, shoes, electronics and books as reported by the U.S. Commerce Department. Sales in those segments collectively declined by 2.8 percent in 2009 and 0.4 percent in 2008 during the July-September period.

“Based on arithmetic alone, the expected July jump in [back-to-school] spending could be extremely strong,” Michael P. Niemira, chief economist and director of research for ICSC, said in a statement. “Layer on some fundamental improvement in the consumer economy, including some pickup in the pace of earnings growth, and we should see a strong 7.6 percent rise for July, continued strength in August with a 5.7 percent increase, and a moderate 3 percent rise in September.”

Meanwhile the National Retail Federation says that summer sales so far make it hard to predict back-to-school spending. According to the NRF, June retail industry sales (which exclude automobiles, gas stations and restaurants) decreased 0.5 percent seasonally adjusted over May and increased 3.3 percent unadjusted year-over-year.

“Today’s data shows consumers continue to take a cautious approach towards shopping,” said NRF President and CEO Matt Shay. “However, growth in key areas such as electronics, apparel and department stores is an encouraging sign as we enter the back-to-school shopping season.”

So, in other words, who the heck knows how the rest of summer will play out? It seems that some kind of year-over-year increase is in our future but just how big that increase will be is pretty uncertain.

And considering the sales declines of the last two summers, a minimal increase over terrible sales would be, well, less terrible. But not necessarily anything to write home about.

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Walden University, a private, for-profit online university that’s part of Baltimore-based Laureate International Universities, has teamed up with the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives to offer discounted tuition to members for graduate and undergraduate programs.

NOBLE, founded in 1976, is an organization that works to eliminate racism in the law enforcement field.  Specifically for NOBLE members, Walden’s School of Public Policy and Administration has added six new certificate programs — five graduate and one undergraduate — in public policy, criminal justice, homeland security and nonprofit management.

NOBLE is holding its 2010 conference in Baltimore –- it began Saturday and goes through today — which Walden is partly sponsoring.  Two program directors in Walden’s School of Public Policy and Administration presented workshops on criminal justice and nonprofit board management.

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The Baltimore Orioles are ranked 20th out of the Major League’s 30 baseball teams in popularity, according to a Harris Interactive poll released this week. That’s down from last year’s ranking of 17th. The poll was conducted June 14 to 21.

But hey, at least they beat the Washington Nationals (ranked 27th). At first that was a surprise to me considering the poll was conducted during the Stephen Strasburg Era. After all, you’d think a phenom pitcher would give the Nats, who also came in last year at 27th, a few more points. But baseball in D.C. is still young and the fanbase is fickle. And while Strasburg may be a rock star here, nationwide, he’s just somebody you don’t want pitching against your team.

Meanwhile the New York Yankees are ranked first for the eighth-straight year. The Boston Red Sox are ranked second. If he saw the results before he died this morning, that had to give owner George Steinbrenner one last smile.

Here are some more interesting fun facts from the poll:

Over one-third of Americans (36%) say they follow Major League Baseball, a number that is down from last year when 41% said they followed baseball and 40% said so in 2008. Looking at who follows baseball, men are more likely to do so than women (46% versus 27%). Also African Americans are more likely to be followers of the sport, compared to both Whites and Hispanics (41% versus 36% and 34%). There is also a regional divide, as almost half of Easterners (48%) say they follow baseball, compared to one-third of Westerners (34%) and 29% of Southerners.

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