Category: accessible Devices
RNIB are launching a talking freeview box in August and they've already had more orders for it than they can handle! I think it sounds pretty good because they've worked with another manufacturer called Goodmens and it's a decent price as well. It seems to have quite a clear voice from the demo I heard of it and apparently for partially sighted people there is an option of making the print on the screen larger or smaller. I might wait until the queue's died down a bit then get one myself because I like the fact that it reads the tv guide thing as well. What do people think of the new talking freeview box? It's on RNIB's online shop if anyone wants to have a look at the description.
I thought there were already boxes that talked through all the programmes. I bet they aren't as cheap as normal Freeview boxes, which are easy enough to use.
The only other ones that talk through all the programs like that are like 600£ which are way too expensive. Yes I normally expect stuff that talks to be a bit more expensive than something that doesn't, but not that much. I know what you mean though.
I'm actually in the market for something that can get ad at the moment. I don't really care if the menues read or not, but it really needs to be a dvr. There just doesn't seem to be any freeview boxes that support the extra streme that is required in order to here the descriptions.
As a side note, all of the audio description boxes that I've found only have scart out. This isn't really much of an issue for me obviously, but I'm wondering if freeview is transmitted at high enough quality that the change from hdmi to scart would be noticeable for sighted people.
For the more technically minded, I spoke to someone a couple of months ago who installed windoweyes on a thin client that was running windows xp embedded. Since there are some freeview boxes floating around running xpe, I've been toying with the idea of seeing if I could get we up and running on it.
Sorry for highjacking the topic a bit there.
I'm completely confused. What is Freeview? Is it something that works with television or is it an online service of some kind?
freeview is a UK tv service.
My concern is that RNIB are way too late on this, as theBBC are getting ready to launch a new service that will offer much more than freeview, and I hope this box could be upgraded to work with this new service, and not leave us another 5 to 10 years behind the rest of the UK.