Accessibility Features of Digital Media Players
The people at AFB AccessWorld recently published an article pertaining to the accessiblity features of portable digital media players. Specifically in this article they were evaluating the popular mainstream devices for their accessbility to the blind or visually impaired population. They looked into the popular players including the iPod, Zune, Kindle, and Olympus Digital voice recorder. They were particularly interested in using these devices for digital music, books and other forms of digital information. Not surprisingly they found that only 3 mainstream digital players were accessible to the visually impaired population, and only 1 player, the Olympus DS-50 had speech output of the menu screen. This is what the article said about the Oympus digital recorder:
This device is marketed as a digital voice recorder, but it also plays MP3 and Windows Media music files and podcasts, as well as Audible.com books. It is the only mainstream player we found that has both tactilely discernable buttons and speech output for navigating menus.
To read the entire article go to:
http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw090404
And watch for Part 2 which will report on the adapted readers including the Victor Reader and PDA's