Apple Releases Accessible ITunes and Nano

Apple has recently released two accessible products allowing greater access for those who are blind and visually impaired and those with print disabilities. iTunes 8 is now accessible with screen readers 4th generation of the iPod Nano which has optional spoken menus and both support a number of other accessibility features.

Screen readers are a type of accessibility product known more generally as text to speech. This software will take electronic text and convert it into synthesized speech. Text to speech software for the visually impaired also allow a user to navigate a document or website through the use of keyboard commands versus the use of a mouse. Both reading text and navigation are dependent on the content being created to be accessible. Until this latest release of iTunes, users were unable to navigate the Apple store using a screen reader without the use of third party software.

iTunes 8 now allows users to navigate and purchase downloads from the iTunes store using their screen readers such as Apple's Voiceover or JAWS by Freedom Scientific. The newest edition of iTunes also supports other accessibility features such as zoom and sticky keys, which makes keys stay "on" allowing someone with a to complete keyboard shortcuts while hitting a single key at a time.

Apple has also just released it's 4th generation of the iPod Nano which has optional spoken menus. In order to activate the menus the user must be using iTunes 8 and Mac OS X v10.4.11 or later or Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 3 or later). While users running the Mac OS can activate the spoken menus during the initial synchronization process between iTunes and the Nano, Microsoft users will have to ensure to enable text to speech and choose a voice in their XP or Vista operating system. The spoken menus work by creating an audio file which synches with your music.

"When you sync, iTunes 8 creates spoken descriptions for the contents of your iPod nano using the text-to-speech engine on your computer...and then syncs them to your iPod nano (4th generation) along with your music."

The information provided does not indicate how much memory this could take away from the overall memory, but it shouldn't be noticeable on the even the smallest of Nanos which is 8 gigabytes.

Other accessibility features of the Nano include large text and high contract screen, adjustable backlight and caption support. It is unclear whether this can be turned on and off by the documentation on Apple's website, they say only "Captions in video are displayed when they are present using a legible, high-contrast white-on-black font." Other iPod models have suppored captioning in the past, such as the 3rd Generation Nano and iPod classic. Apple's accessibility site for hearing notes that users can search for closed captioned movies by using iTune's power search. At this time, only 93 movies are turned up in a search of closed captioned movies.

These are great advances in accessibility by Apple who has long built accessibility features into its computers.

Apple's Accessibility Page http://www.apple.com/accessibility/
Apple's Voiceover http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/
Freedon Scientific's JAWS http://www.freedomscientific.com/jaws-hq.asp