MP3 players: Assessing Accessiblity

Do you plan to buy a new personal MP3 for your audiobook listening? Will you be adding iPods or Windows-based MP3 players to your public or school library collection for patron checkout, increasing your patron's use of subscription download services such as OverDrive or NetLibrary? Perhaps you are a classroom or special education teacher looking for a way to make use of the public library's free audiobook downloads by having MP3 players, a Sony E Reader or Kindle for student use. Be sure to take a look at these recommendations of mainstream audio players from the American Foundation for the Blind. Here's what the project is all about:

Thanks to grants from the Reader's Digest Partners for Sight Foundation and the Huntington Foundation, AFB TECH has been evaluating the accessibility of what we call portable media players. Our project has focused on using these players with digital music, books, and other sources of digital information. Apple's iPod is certainly the most well-known product in this category of devices, which are sometimes referred to as MP3 players or digital audio players. For this project, we gathered the current line of Apple iPods, but we also examined several other mainstream devices, including the Creative Technology line of players, the Microsoft Zune, the Sony Walkman and E Reader, the Amazon Kindle, and the Olympus DS-50 digital voice recorder.

Great information for any audio player user - with important accessibility issues to kind in mind.