Question for blind people: audiobook device recommendations

In My Humble Opinion
1

My sweet mother in law, aged near 90, has macular degeneration and will soon lose sight in one of her eyes. I suspect the other eye will follow. She’s had surgery for it before so my understanding is that this is it. She used to love to read so my husband I want to buy her some kind of audiobook device. But it will need audio controls also. She won’t be able to see button labels or text on a screen. Is there anything like that on the market?

2

I am not blind, but I know that Rockbox can be installed on some players and that it has voice menus. I’m sure you can find a list somewhere of exactly which players will work with Rockbox.

3

This looks like something that could work for her: HumanWare - The all new Victor Reader Stream

You could also look into an old iPod Classic, the ones with actual buttons, if you can find one (or if you have an old one). They should have accessibility features like Voice-Over which reads the menus out loud.

4

Since the OP is asking for recommendations, let’s move this to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

5

Get her signed up with the National Library Service for the Blind - they offer free equipment and free books, plus info on buying your own equipment if you want that:

My mom used this service.

6

Our Skald the Rhymer is now blind (or close to it); I’m wondering if he’s looked into such devices.

7

OMG, this is the best! Thank you!

8

I have RP, and still have some central vision, but reading on paper is extremely difficult and reading books on a screen is also slow and difficult. So I’m largely and audiobook reader.

I am all-in on the accessibility features of the Apple ecosystem. VoiceOver is universally supported on Apple devices, and pretty much every third-party app is navigable with it. The least expensive iPod touch, which will hold quite a bit of audio, is about $200. There are a number of apps supporting audiobooks: Audible, Books (Apple’s ebook/audiobook store), and OverDrive and Hoopla (supported by libraries for borrowing books–which you can also do with the Kindle app, I think). You can also use VoiceOver to read pretty much any on screen text.

There are also a lot of free or cheap apps that let you use the camera to read text or recognize objects, though I’m not sure all of them work on the Touch.