SimplyBlog
Summary: iPods and other MP3 players are meant to be heard, but currently require good vision to use them effectively. I suggest simple features that would make them more accessible, and more fun for everyone to use, including setting the font size, icons in menus, audio icons, spoken menus and song names, display controls, scrollwheel sensitivity controls, and closed captions.
As tools for playing music and other types of audio, MP3 players are ideal for people with visual impairments or blindness, but none of them are ideally designed for users with disabilities. Modifying the iPod software for accessibility should be fairly straightforward, and most of the changes would provide useful or fun customizability for all users. Here are some suggested features for a more accessible iPod.
iPod Shuffle
The display-less Shuffle is already well-designed for using without vision. Visual indicators show the battery status, when the player is paused, and when the player is on hold. Each of these could easily be replaced with a distinctive audio signal for each state. A setting in iTunes would determine whether the audio signals would be used.
Choose Font Size
With the release of the 5th generation iPod, as the resolution of the screen became higher, the size of the font became smaller.
People with excellent vision may enjoy having as much information displayed at once as possible, especially when looking through very long song lists. For those with poorer vision, or who simply want easier reading conditions, a larger font would be welcome and could be selected in the Settings menu. I would suggest at least 4 size settings (setting to an arbitrary point size might seem nice, but actually would likely make choosing a font size more difficult). The effect would be like altering font size in Safari. All menus would use a larger font.
People with excellent vision may enjoy having as much information displayed at once as possible, especially when looking through very long song lists. For those with poorer vision, or who simply want easier reading conditions, a larger font would be welcome and could be selected in the Settings menu. I would suggest at least 4 size settings (setting to an arbitrary point size might seem nice, but actually would likely make choosing a font size more difficult). The effect would be like altering font size in Safari. All menus would use a larger font.Icons in Menus
This option would place carefully-designed icons to the left of menu items, including album art next to album and song names. This can help people with reading limitations, including young children, people with reading disorders, and people using the iPod in their non-native language. The designs of these icons need to be extensively tested and refined. Poor icons will only add to the confusion. Well-executed designs will be quickly, and hopefully instantly, recognizable and the alternatives in any list need to be highly discriminable. The icons might in fact be different for different language settings, reflecting cultural differences in symbols.
Voice Menus
When activated, this option speaks the words in menus as you browse them. This helps not only people with visual impairments, but anyone who might want to control the iPod without looking, such as drivers. For all voice features, the listener needs to be able to adjust the speaking speed and voice used. Expert users will often prefer much faster speech to avoid waiting through menus.
When scrolling quickly through long alphabetical lists, only the initial letter or two needs to be spoken, and full names can be pronounced only as scrolling slows down.
Beyond the menus themselves, individual applications, such as the games and stopwatch, may need audio voiceover. A simple example would be to pronounce the name of a photo when it is selected. That could be a nice feature for everyone.
Audio Menus
Audio menus would provide iconic sound effects that differentiate the menu options. As an example, consider the different sounds used in FrontRow when selecting music, photos, or movies -- each has a short and pleasant sound to indicate the selection. As with visible icons, these need to be painstakingly designed for clarity, obviousness, and maximum discriminability. They also need to be fast, to avoid slowing down menu selection. Audio menus can be faster to browse than voice menus, and also may benefit people with language disorders that make spoken words difficult to understand, as well as assisting non-native speakers.
Display controls
With some visual impairments, white text can be easier to read than black. High brightness may be painful. Low brightness may be difficult to see. Thus, screen controls should allow the display to be inverted, and provide fine control over brightness and contrast.
Scrollwheel sensitivity
In watching new users with an iPod, I’ve seen several people who had difficulty with the scrolling being too fast. The ability to tune down the sensitivity of the scrollwheel can help a wide variety of people, including young children who have limited coordination, and anyone who has difficulty using their hands for fine movements, including people with big hands!
Closed Captions
Movie playback should allow closed captions. Apple should make it a priority for videos available from the iTMS to have closed captions coded into them. iMovie, and all movie production tools, should make it easy to add closed captions. Since producers often won’t have the budget to include closed captions, there ought to be a community website where people can submit captions they’ve created so that others can download the captions and attach them to caption-less movies.
Another facility for blind users who want to enjoy movies is “audio descriptions”. These are a second audio track for movies that describes what is happening visually. At the very least, the movie format, the playback device, and the authoring tools should support this second audio track.
Show Lyrics
This one isn’t even needed! Thankfully, you can already click through to the lyrics of a song, assuming they’re available. That helps people with hearing impairments participate in the listening experience.
Still, audiobooks don’t currently come with the text of the book, and that’s a shame. Podcasts could have the text automatically generated through speech recognition, though it may need extensive editing. That would be a nice feature to add to GarageBand so that transcripts can be included with the audio.
Announce Songs
This option would state back information about a song whenever a new song starts, such as song name, artist, or album. The user could choose exactly which metadata is read.
Conclusion
Most of these suggestions would be fairly easy to add to the current iPod design. iPods are designed for listening, and it’s a tragic injustice that they are currently so inaccessible to the people who most benefit from an audio device. Most of these features would be a delight for everyone, so let’s petition for these improvements.
iPod accessibility
Sunday, July 30, 2006
