Apple iPod Visually Impaired Friendly
Published: Jun 20, 2007With the creation of a MP3 player without display, the iPod Shuffle, Apple www.apple.com has reached a new group of fans – the visually impaired. Thanks to the minimalist approach to the user interface, the iPod engineers have unwittingly enabled a person who is visually impaired to easily use the device.
Moses Choo Siew Cheong is the assistant executive director of the National Council for the Blind in Malaysia. His job includes making decisions on technology matters for the organization. The iPod shuffle is an all-white electronic device about the size of a pack of gum. It resembles a USB thumb drive and the front of the unit is dominated by a large circular button that allows the user to perform five functions - play/pause, volume up, volume down, next track and previous track.
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The back of the unit features a slider that enables the user to toggle between off, shuffle and play songs in order. With a storage capacity of 512 megabytes, the iPod Shuffle allows a user 25 hours of music when encoded at 64 kilobits per second (Kbps), about the same quality as a FM radio broadcast.
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The shuffle idea is heavily incorporated in the iPod for users that don’t want to manually select a song to listen to, but just want to let the iPod do it for you in random order, or shuffle. Don’t like a chosen track? Just skip to the next one.
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“If you press and hold ‘next’ or ‘previous,’ you can scroll through a track. We call this function ‘queue and review’. It’s good for the blind as it allows us to listen to long audio files such as a radio program,” Choo said in the New Straits Times (Malaysia), adding that he regularly visited sites such as bbc.com, acbradio.com and audio-read.com.au to download radio programs in MP3 format.
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Source: New Straits Times (Malaysia)
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