Category: accessible Devices
I am looking into getting an MP3 player , but not sure which MP3 players out there are accessible to the blind and visually impaired. I have heard a lot of different answers as far as which ones people think are accessible. If anyone could please help me out, that would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Kat
Hi Kat. Well, there is actually a talking MP3 player, Milestone 311, available from RNIB, which takes up to two hours of files, tracks and stuff, but you'll need a memory card like those cards you get with your digital camera if you need any more space. I'm not sure how good it is, I haven't seen it yet, but I know there's four tactile control buttons, it is a voice recorder and it's only the size of a credit card. The price however, is £180
You can use rockbox with various mp3 players and this will add speech navigation etc. The site is: www.rockbox.org
They have info on compatible players. I'd say go for the I river H340 or perhaps the H320. but I'd wait and see if Apple will include speech on the new I pods. Supposedly that's happening. Or perhaps rockbox will work with the new generation I pods soon.
The Milestone referred to early is available in the States from Independent Living Aids.
Lou
I have recently purchased an Apple Ipod shuffle. It is very easy to use and instead of using iTunes I use Xplay. The shuffle holds around 240 songs, has easy to use buttons and with Xplay is easy to load MP3s onto it. Plus it is inexpensive too.
there isn't a whole lot of choices, but the rockbox software is great for the mp3 players it supports.
I love my iPod. It's one of the bricks, but it works well, and I don't use the Rockbox software on it.
I have an Iriver H120 running Rockbox. It's great and even does recording in full CD-quality wave files.
I used the RockBox software about a year or so ago. The problem I had with it was that it was all digitized speech and it couldn't pronounce exact file names, only file numbers or spelling file names, which is really tedious! I assume this is still the case? I use a BookPort for my mp3 player. I plan on buying a MileStone mentioned above in the near future.
I have an IRiver H340 running the Rockbox firmware. To get a great review go to www.blindcooltech.com, go to the archive section and look for iriver or rockbox. The rockbox does read filenames in full you just need to download a script from www.rockbox.org read the short read me file and run it. It's really straight forward. I would recommend the iriver, it's a bit chunky but its got loads of features. I heard the Arcos juke boxes are smaller, about the size of a cigarette box but they don't make them any more so you will have to look at eBay or something. If you have any questions just track me down and ask.
I've used several mp3 players, with varying success. Probably the most accessible one I've had so far is my Muvo, which only has a few buttons and is really easy to figure out. The only problem was that the model I got had very little disk space and couldn't hold as many songs as I wanted. I'm hopefully getting an IRiver h10 for Christmas and plan to put Rockbox on it, so that should work much better.
how does that look like? how many songs does the bigest model hold at the most?
i have a mp3 player but i need a better one min is really bad i need a bigger one use.