Audio Menus for iPods
From: Technology Review - 05/08/2007
By: Kate Greene

Researchers are testing ways to let people listen to gadget menu options
instead of looking at them. 

Scrolling through an iPod menu requires a significant amount of visual
attention and can be a hindrance during physical activity and even dangerous
while driving. To make iPod menu navigation easier and safer, the University
of Toronto and Microsoft Research have collaborated to create software that
would allow iPod users to navigate the menu using audio clues. The
researchers have developed an auditory menu system called earPod that
provides audio feedback as a person moves his or her finger over the touch
pad. While earPod is not ready to replace the extensive menus on real iPods,
Microsoft Research scientist Patrick Baudisch says the results are
encouraging. After 30 minutes of using the technology, users can navigate two
levels of earPod menus faster than traditional visual menus, and with just as
much accuracy. Baudisch says that audio menus could help gadgets save battery
life by not lighting up the screen, and could add functions to screen-free
devices such as the iPod shuffle. The earPod system assigns selections to
different areas of the iPod's circular touch pad, allowing users to jump
directly to a selection, rather than scrolling through as with the regular
iPod. Eventually, the earPod could even be programmed to read off a limited
number of names of artists and songs. Georgia Institute of Technology
professor of psychology and computing Bruce Walker says audio interfaces are
not widespread in handheld consumer devices because audio hardware and
software is resource intensive, requires significant amounts of computation
and energy, and is difficult to program, but because computing power is
becoming cheaper, and there is greater demand for new ways to interact with
handheld devices, he expects the number of researchers investigating ways to
make better audio interfaces to grow over the next few years. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18703/

Links:
Download an MP3 version of this story
http://www.audiodizer.com/technologyreview/infotech/download.aspx?id=18703

Patrick Baudisch
http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/

Bruce Walker
http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/~walkerb/

Shengdong Zhao
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~sszhao/

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Comment by Martin Courcelles:

Hmm, interesting. Why are they reinventing the wheel and making it more
complicated? There's an open source project which leaves these researchers in
the dust. Check out: 

RockBox
http://www.rockbox.org

Voice Files:
For blind or other users that wish to have the menus and/or filenames voiced,
we have a set of voice files available to download from: 
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/VoiceFiles

Essentially, you replace the firmware of your MP3 player with the Rockbox
software, drop in a voice file of your choice and you have a talking player.
The product supports a wide range of hard-drive-based players, including
Ipods. I have the firmware loaded up on my IRiver 5Gig player and it works
very well.  

Submitted by Alan Cantor