[vicsireland] Access to Portable Players
- From: "tonysweeney" <tonysweeney1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "vics" <vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:13:55 -0000
Taken from the Hartgen website.
Must say I recommend the iAudio, notentioned for som by by Brian Hartgen.
The iAudio not mentioned for some reason!
I do use it.
Access to Portable Players and Services 2006
Access to Portable Players and Services 2006
Introduction
At the time of writing, the year 2006 is drawing to a close. So I thought
it was worth briefly reflecting upon the current year's developments in
terms
of access to portable media devices and associated services, such as
downloading music and books to such devices, examining particularly their
accessibility
from a visually impaired person's perspective.
Findings
In general, I feel 2006 has been an extremely disappointing year. I begain
to take an interest in the area of portable media devices during 2004, and
from
that year until the start of 2006, we began to see some improvements in this
area from an accessibility standpoint. I started to develop the JAWS
scripts
for iTunes, the Rockbox firmware was starting to be noticed by visually
impaired people, and players which could accommodate Rockbox (and which were
reasonably
accessible without it such as those from iRiver) were popular mainstream
devices which could be obtained very easily.
I feel during this year however we have been poorly served.
It is now quite difficult (although admittedly not impossible) to obtain the
iRiver H300 series of players.
Most crucially, Apple decided to change the way in which iTunes displayed
information on the screen. The software was challenging to access prior to
the
release of version 7, but things are now much worse.
JAWS 7.10 and later contains some difficulties with interacting successfully
with iTunes release 7 to the extent that information from the screen is
unable
to be accurately interpreted, together with there being focus difficulties
due to that inaccurate rendering of content. There is no end to that in
sight
as yet.
A new generation of iPods have been released. Not only are these devices
not capable of accommodating the Rockbox firmware, thus rendering them
almost
inaccessible unless you are willing to learn the order of menu items, but in
addition a user of such a device is forced to use iTunes version 7 in order
to update its firmware.
Access to downloadable music content is still extremely limited.
Irrespective of the version of iTunes being used, there is no possibility of
purchasing
entire albums from the iTunes Music Store.
Being Positive
Trying to be positive as the year closes, I can say that Annapod Explorer
from Redchair Software allows a user to transfer audio material to a second
generation
iPod device (the newer models), although you will still need iTunes to
update the firmware. Although there are some focus issues from time to time
within
Annapod, in the most part it allows you to transfer material to an iPod with
ease. Using the device independently thereafter however could be tricky.
All the accessible devices for visually impaired people are still available,
such as the Book Courier, Book Port, Braille Note and PAC Mate.
One area which could well be interesting is the development of the Talks
software for Series 60 third generation mobile phones. Many of these
devices are
music players. They are capable of playing music content which is protected
using the DRM (Digital Rights Management) format, and I am hopeful this
includes
content from Napster, although this has not been tested. If so, we have a
very usable music download service, as the Napster interface I think is
accessible
with screen-reading software.
Rockbox continues to improve and the willing volunteer developers should be
highly congratulated for their efforts. If you want to listen to audio
where
the content is unprotected, using Rockbox installed onto an iRiver H340, as
I do, is by far the best combination possible in terms of accessibility.
Failing
that Rockbox can be used on an older iPod model, such as the iPod Nano first
generation, although the controls are by no means as well defined as the
iRiver
products.
In terms of access to iTunes, we do have a set of scripts which function
with iTunes version 7 and provide compatibility with JAWS versions between 5
and
7.
My favourite purchase of 2006 was undoubtedly the Plextalk PTR2 DAISY
player/recorder. A full review of this portable device appears elsewhere on
this
site, however since I purchased it, I have used it almost every day - if not
for recording, then it has been used to play DAISY titles.
Links to all resources mentioned in this article are contained elsewhere on
the web site.
Other related posts:
- » [vicsireland] Access to Portable Players