I made a new friend at the weekend, and spent some time telling him about my enduring passion, the empeg. He was pretty excited about it, in spite of the fact that he wouldn't be able to use it himself in it's intended environment, the car.

The reason for this is - he's blind.

He is able to browse the web, however, with a speech converter that allows him to "read" the content of a page. His standard entertainment is the radio, and digitised audio books that he plays back from his PC. MP3 is a well known technology for him - his trouble is that he cannot cart his PC with him to his parents, and so forth, or listen to them when he is being driven about. He knows of portable players such as the Rio, but their memory is insufficient for storing, say, a whole book. With the empeg, that's not an issue. Although there are maybe suitable portables around, the empeg is what fascinated him - he "got it" straight away.

So finally, to the point. He has the ability to listen at far higher speeds to the spoken voice than normally sighted people, and he uses the Kjofel player on his player on his PC to speed up the playback rate to around 50% higher than the normal speed.

A number of PC based players can do variable speed playback - it would be nice (for at least one potential owner anyway) if variable speed was an option.

PS. Tony - I had (by chance) my remote with me at the weekend, and he played with it a bit to see how to operate it. Unsighted, it took him about 10 minutes to learn each of the keys and had no trouble at all orienting it the correct way every time, or remembering the key functions. Oh, and we were pissed at the time too...

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

One thing he should look at is www.visuaide.com - the main contributor to SA11[01]0 linux is Nico Pitre, who himself is blind (this still amazes me: debugging the kernel with braille!). They do a product, the Victor, which is a portable talking book for the blind, based on a SA1100 at 133Mhz & linux.

Hugo

Hey there,

Your friend might want to consider the PJB100 as well. That is of course a lot more portable. Of course, it doesn't have variable-speed playback as well, yet. But the firmware developers do frequent the PJB100 bulletin board on eGroups, so you could see what kind of response they might have to the idea.


Michael Grant
12GB Green
080000266