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Devices and Desires

Consumer technologies, particularly personal entertainment devices, provide a tantalizing look at new platforms for information accessibility. MP3 players are particularly interesting because they come close to the model of Daisy Digital Talking Books players for the masses, but only close. Consumers are benefitting from the proliferation of standards-based technologies for information delivery. MP3 audio is the most visible of these technologies, and yes, it is a standard, albeit not entirely an open one in that it is based upon patented technologies and requires manufacturers to pay a licensing fee. Within a brief period, we have seen the commercial availability of MP3 players based upon solid-state memory (Compact Flash, Smartmedia, Memory Stick, etc), as well as CD-based players, that allow from 2 to 20 hours of high quality audio to be carried around in a hand held unit. This permits an audio book listener to have one or more books available in their pocket, ready to listened to, without having to keep track of cassette tapes or audio Cds. To the Daisy Digital Talking Book community, such devices mimic the capabilities of more advanced Daisy Playback devices: ability to pause and resume playback, memory of stopping position on multiple Cds, and navigation of playlists and directories of MP3 files. But these promising feature remain that, promising. Non-visual accessibility is the one key feature lacking from all consumer MP3 devices. There is virtually no way to use any of the navigation features without relying upon the built in visual display, which severely limits their use by persons with visual disabilities, and for that matter, persons driving automobiles (a major market for audio products!) who shouldn't take their eyes from the road to fumble with small visual displays and controls. Providing accessibility can be as simple as audio icons to indicate modes and operations, to pre-recorded voice prompts and text to speech generation of prompts of title, mode, position and navigation items. Are the manufacturers listening?

One organization that has a vision of an accessible consumer device is Simputer (http://www.simputer.org) . This Indian group has designed a PDA, which not only uses open source software, but is based on an open source hardware platform. Anyone in the world can build a Simputer (though commercial organizations planning to sell them must pay a reasonable license fee to the Simputer organization). The Simputer includes audio, text to speech, and a visual display, and is, in effect, an accessible PDA for the masses, costing significantly less than PocketPC or Palm.

Will Simputer succeed? The answer is unclear, but if they do, the desires of many for low cost accessibility to the digital revolution may be answered for many.