If you're visually impaired or legally blind, living in the age of the MP3 player can be frustrating. Small screens, tiny fonts, complicated menus, and imprecise controls make the majority of MP3 players very difficult to use.
Until now, visually impaired users often resorted to counting scroll wheel clicks and memorising menus, or installing and configuring third-party firmware, such as the open source Rockbox (a project not recommended for the technologically timid).
By adding a Spoken Menus feature to their fourth-generation iPod nano, Apple is one of the first manufacturers to dramatically improve the usability of their MP3 players for vision-impaired users. The iPod nano's "spoken menus" option literally speaks menu and song selections to you in a synthesised voice, making it possible to navigate your iPod completely by sound. For this tip, we'll go step-by-step through the process of activating the iPod nano's spoken menus and tweaking them to your taste. There's also a video version of this how-to offered at the end of this story.
Here are the steps involved for setting up your fourth-generation iPod nano for spoken menus.
1. Setting up iTunes
Connect your iPod to your computer, launch iTunes 8, and select your iPod from the left pane. The main iTunes window should now be a summary page for your iPod with a few checkbox options near the bottom of the window. Check off the last option, marked "Enable spoken menus", then hit the Apply button in the lower right corner of iTunes.It will take a few minutes for your computer to read the contents of your iPod, generate the necessary voice cues, and sync those cues back to your iPod.
