Amazingly Useful Audio Player for the Blind

The only problem with advanced gizmos are that they are becoming more featureful at the cost of simplicity. Look at an Nokia N97 or HP Pavilion TX 2500z, they are absolutely amazing but only if you have a guidebook with you. With such geeky things at sight did we ever think of the physically challenged people? How will a blind person navigate through a complex shaped and buttoned device to listen to music? The HumanWare VictorReader Stream digital-audio player certainly did and here is how they can be a wonderful pet to a blind man’s ears.

1. It has a very spacious device floor so that you can touch and feel any and every key distinctively without looking at it. Remember the purpose of it?
2. You will notice an unusual thing right up. There is a numeric keypad. If you are wondering what is a sequence of 1-9 doing in a mp3 player, then take this for an instance. Repeatedly pressing the number one will cycle you though the Stream’s main menu categories, each announced over your headphones or the internal speaker in a pleasant synthetic voice.
3. Below the keypad are basic playback controls (Play, Pause, Reverse, and Skip)
4. There is an oval shaped key just above which acts like a built-in sleep timer. Just in case you snooze while reading err listening to e-book.
5. The top edge of the Stream includes a Mini-USB port for connecting to a Mac or PC and there is a power adapter connection too.
6. The VictorReader Stream is capable of playing multiple music formats (FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, MPEG2, WAV, WMA 9) with surprisingly excellent audio quality and some national library services integrated with it.
7. The capability to place and recall multiple bookmarks is absolutely useful for a music lover.
8. There is another significant technology in this device called Nuance Vocalizer for Mobile. It directly convert any text file (txt, rtf, html, xml, brf) into speech using an onboard synthetic voice. Beat that.

It sure comes with a heavy $349 price tag but for a device like that and the sheer usefulness, its worth every penny.