Itunes, accessibility and moving in the right direction

I am a techy type of person. You hear of men and their toys, well its me and my toys! LOL Luckily for me, at this point in my career being techy is part of my job and helps keep it interesting. For those of you who don't know (or don't remember) I teach computers/technology to people who are blind or visually impaired. Specifically I teach the Internet class which also allows me the freedom to teach things like itunes and instan messenging and other fun trendy websites of the time.

One of the biggest challenges over the past few years has been itunes and ipods. They just were not accessible for the blind and not much easier for the visually impaired. Itunes is not too bad for low vision users on the computer but for those who use a program called Jaws (www.freedomscientific.com)it was pretty much useless unless you were willing to spend another $75 to be able to use itunes (a free program!) and I am not even sure how well that would work because we never got the demo to work at all at work.

Well, all of this was about to change last week after the new Itunes 8.0 was released. I was doing the update on my computer and I happen to notice in the release notes for the new version of itunes that it was now accessible with "Window Eyes" which is a screen reader program for blind users. As soon as I saw this I went and did some google searching to find out more and I learned that Apple and GW Micro (The makes of Window-Eyes) had been working together to make itunes more accessible for blind users. The program I teach students is Jaws, but in my mind if they made it accessible with Window-Eyes, it has to be at least more accessible than it was before with Jaws. And last night I learned how right I was....and more!

Yesterday after work, I took my friend Jay (Who happens to be blind) to the Apple store at the mall and look into getting an ipod. We were not sure how well this was going to work out for him but I had been able to help other blind users use their ipods with less skills than he has so I was optimistic he would have no problems. When we got there we started looking and playing with the different options available and had settled on one of the 120GB classic ipods. While we were looking at the cases for it we got help from a wonderful employee, Tim. After deciding on a case we went with Tim to one of the computers to check out and that was when things took a turn in the right direction.

Tim didn't seem to realize at first that Jay was blind and when he did he started googling for some info in hopes of trying to help Jay. Jay actually asked him if there was some way to make the ipod read out the menus and song titles and Tim had remembered reading something so he was on a mission. After looking around the apple website a little he found what he had been looking for.

The new 4th generation Ipod Nano is blind accessible! It will actually read the menus on the ipod!

This was fantastic news! I told him I heard the new itunes was more accessible but did not know that about the Nano. Jay and I were both a little skeptical at how well this would work and so we asked Tim if there was any way we could see it in action on an ipod before making a purchase because it would be the deal breaker for either buying a nano or a classic. Tim was great. He went and got permission to open an ipod and then got a tech in the back with a computer to come out and hook up to some speakers so that we could see if it really did work and how hard it is to make it work. Tim and the tech guy Victor were fantastic and they spent an hour with us trying it all out and answering all our questions to make sure it really did work the way we thought it would. And it did.

So after our testing, we walked out of the mall and Jay had a new ipod Nano.

We went back to his apt and I helped him to set it up and get his itunes account all set up before we started messing with if itunes would be accessible too. I was so thrilled when we first turned Jaws on because for the first time I had ever seen it was actually reading things the way it should and it WAS accessible. It requires a lot of tabbing and there are a few things we still need to sort out how will work best with Jaws but we were able to get his music into itunes and onto his ipod! We didn't quite get the itunes store to work with Jaws yet but we didn't spend much time on it yet either because it was late and I needed to get home. For now, we have his ipod set to sync so that he can go through his music list in itunes and delete music he doesn't need and it will automatically be the same on his ipod. We didn't get into playlists yet and how to manually move the music over yet but it will give us something to play with in the meantime. Hopefully we can get itunes back on our computers at work soon too and really start showing this to people.

So, I just had to share this exciting news. It should be noted that the feature of having the ipod read the menus and titles is something that ANYONE can enable on their ipod, not just blind users. And its really easy. If anyone has a question, feel free to ask and I will do my best to help!