I just found out this week that a close friend went blind. No one knows if its permanent of temporary yet but best guess is that it will be a reality for at least 3 months if its not permanent. A group of us started talking about how we could help her and a desktop was the obvious result of that discussion along with a text-to-speech engine however that will take awhile to get sorted out. The next topic of discussion was about getting music and audio books for her since she is absolutely SICK of listening to the news replay over and over. Sounds easy enough.

Next problem.. she refuses to learn braille yet as she is fighting to get her eyesight back. So getting audio books and music is great however she has no way to identify what it is in the case. Yep. You guessed it, next suggestion is well lets get her an mp3 player. So I start looking for software for an Ipod.. and HOLY SHIT BATMAN.. Apple has ZERO support that I could find for Blind people. So I start digging..

There are an estimated 1 MILLION blind adults in the United States as of 2004. Lets think this through.. there are 1 Million People who DEPEND on their hearing and not a single MP3 player I could find on the market supports voice menus. Hell.. even when I started looking into IPods I discovered that you can NOT buy a new, bigger IPod without a video screen.. Well shit.. now what..

Well the open source community has done a fantastic thing and created their own software for MP3 players that support Ipods. www.rockbox.org has a dual boot firmware application that takes 10 seconds to install (not including download time) and will read small files placed into each folder aloud making it a perfect application for blind people.

I did run into a few configuration issues which I am going to post here for anyone who wants to the same thing for a friend. There are a couple ways of viewing files for the sighted, one is using their own database or the other is by using a directory system. Unfortunately I did not realise that the database does not allow for recorded folder and file mp3 files which means as you scroll through the options in the database it will spell out each folder for you which is aggravating to say the least. So.. after I deleted the 20+ GBs of Audio Books from ITunes I set about creating a folder structure that made sense, the reasons for this will be explained in a moment.

Audiobooks
——> History
———–> The Learning Company
—————–> The Civil War
mp3 files


Audiobooks
——> Thriller
———–> Book Group - John Sandford
—————–> John Sandford - 02 - Shadow Prey
mp3 files

Using a very sweet little application called VoiceBox (also from RockBox) it will auto generate voice tags using text to speech for every folder and mp3 file in the directory structure. This can be a serious time saver when your trying to do this quickly! However this forced me to start thinking like a blind person. I originally had my folder called John Sandford. Well that doesent help me identify if it is a grouping folder or a folder with files in it. So I changed the folder name to Book Group - John Sandford to help her know which folders are groups and which would contain mp3s.

I used the following links to be able to set up the Ipod 5.5 Generation 30Gb Video.
Main Installation Instructions for Ipod.
Voice Tagging

– Begin Rant – I can NOT understand why the software to do this has to be developed by open sourcers.. You would have thought some marketing genius at Apple or some other company would have said.. Hey.. if we build IPod software that will read directory names and file names outloud as you scroll that there are at least a million new consumers out there would would want to buy our product immeadiately. Come on people! I mean anyone if they shut their eyes can manage a click wheel and know where the four buttons on the click wheel are. It is almost the perfect tool for a blind person and yet.. NADA. NOT A SINGLE SOLITARY SAUSAGE! – End Rant –