Blind Bargains Qast 17: The Golden Age Of Braille N Print

It's no surprise to me that the stand-alone NLS player is more popular than the BARD mobile app. As a rehab instructor, I see this all the time. For one thing, using the player is virtually as simple as plugging it in and turning it on. If you want to use the app, however, you need to master using the mobile device with its accessibility features turned on, be able to search for and download apps which means being able to set up an Apple ID, and then you have to master the UI of the app. You think the sentence is long? Just try swallowing having to learn all these things when all you really want is to relax and read a book. The other thing I see is a tendency for the digital cartridges to be more popular than using the BARD site. Again, I suspect this is because using the site is actually a complicated process.

With the following apps, I can do everything the Blaze does and more minus the ocr. Bard mobile: I can read nls books on it. Books can be directly downloaded to the ipad mini. Audible: I can read books from audible. Books can be directly downloaded to the ipad mini. You can't read books from Audible on the Blace. Here's what Jenny Axler from HIMS said about Audible: Regarding Audible, it's not quite so simple. audible has absolutely NO development tools for Android. That's not to say they do not have Apps, but they can create apps without releaseing development tools to the public. Thus, we're exploring possibilities as to how to integrate this support. Thanks, Jenny A follow up message on Audible Hello, You are not wrong. However, Audible refuses to create any new plugins to make any new devices work with the old Audible Manager through which such authorizations were installed. We did contact them. But, we cannot force them to do this. I am sorry. I wish I had a better answer for you. But, they generally no longer wish to support that type of platform. In fact, someone recently contacted their tech support about a BookSense, and they were told Audible didn’t support it. I mean, even for players already in place to work via this method, there is not technical support available through audible any more. Again, I am sorry for this news, but I don’t know that we can do anything about it but to wait for the streaming platform they tell us they’re developing. Thanks, Jenny Kindle: I can read Kindle books from Amazon. You can't read Kindle books on the Blaze. Learning Ally: I can read books from Learning Ally. I can directly download books to my Ipad mini. You can't downloadbooks from Learning Allydirectly to The Blaze. Boice dream reader: I can read books from bookshare, unprotected epub. Supported File Formats PDF, EPUB (DRM free), DAISY 3.0 text-based eBooks, DAISY 2.02 audiobooks, Zipped MP3 files, such as LibriVox, Plain Text, Rich Text Format (RTF), Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Pages, Apple Keynote, HTML, What's nice about voice dream reader, you can download books from both bookshare and Project Gutenberg directly to the ipad mini. Voice dream reader is supplied with Acapela Heather. You have the optionof using Neospeech or Ivona. Personally, I like Neospeech better than Acapela. I haven't tried Ivona as of yet. LibriVox audio books pro: I can stream or download books from LibriVox or a large selection of old time radio shows. The thing I like about this app, it will resume playback when streaming content. Downcast: I can download podcasts directly to the ipad mini. I can subscribe and unsubscribe to podcasts on the Ipad mini. On the Blaze downloading podcasts works very much like the bookport plus and plextalk pocket. Because of this, you can't subscribe to podcasts on The Blaze itself. Youtube: I can use the Google youtube app to watch videos on my ipad mini. You can't do this on the Blaze. Tune n radio pro: TuneIn lets you listen to and record the world’s radio with sports, news, talk and music streaming from every continent. Enjoy 100,000 live radio stations and 2 million podcasts, concerts or shows on your iPhone, iPad and iPod. Record your favorite stream. ooTunes: Radio - Recording and Alarm Clock! INFINITE Tunes, Talk, Sports, and Entertainment Radio. over 36,000 web radio stations. On the Blaze internet radio works very much like the bookport plus and plextalk pocket. Because of this, you don't have access to the large selection of stations like I do using both the tuneIn radio and ooTunes apps. Personally I feel using the touch typing on my Ipad mini is much faster than using multi-tap text entry mode on the BlazeET when searching for books on BARD or bookshare etc. For me, the biggest drawback to the Blaze EZ, it has no telephone style keypad. Here's what Jenny posted about this on the HIMS list: As for entering text, there won't be as much text entry available in this model. To enter Wi-Fi keys, etc, you will use the arrows to choose your letters/numbers from lists, and you will use the select key to enter it. As you might guess, this isn't a quick method of entry, thus, the lack of entry intensive functionality. This model is focusing on providing access to a variety of content while remaining very simple to operate. Thus, the simplified keyboard and different interface. jenny The ipad mini has dual-channel 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi. The blaze has 2.4 GHZ 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi. The Ipad mini has Bluetooth 4.0. The Blaze has bluetooth 3.0 Both the Ipad mini and Blaze have two speakers. The Blaze uses Acapela as it's tts.

I wrote the discussion below in 2014 when a -Tech Doctor- podcast came down hard on the idea of using daisy players. The ironic thing was that when they referred to my comments on the next podcast, they basically ignored the things that I stated that they could be used for that the iPhone could not without finding special apps and turning your phone onto airplane mode so that certain actions were not interrupted by even a phone on vibration mode. They also ignored what I had stated about the advantages of being able to save the books on replaceable memory cards and the ability to keep bookmarked locations and to bookmark recordings. I do like the idea of the Blaze ET with the full number pad. However, I will not consider purchasing a Blaze ET as long as I my daisy players are functional. But, I suspect that the ET has all the functions of the Booksense plus the ability to use it for OCR. ------------------------------------------------------------- On one of the tech doctor podcasts, you came down hard basically saying that you see no use for independent daisy players such as the victor reader stream, Booksense/Booksense XT, or Plextalk PTP1. I know that I will miss some pertinent ideas, but I would like to give my thoughts. I have been a big listener to NLS books ever since I became legally blind. When I was still in the USA, I would listen to them while doing everything from cooking and cleaning, to setting the player outside and turning it up to listen to while I worked in my yard. Needless to say, when I moved to India in January 2008, I missed that. Because I did not want to switch from my Montana service to the US government, I did not try to get one of their players over here. When the BARD services became available, I thought that was great, but I had no access because I did not have anything to play them on. But in 2010, while visiting the USA, I bought my personal daisy player (a Booksense XT), and have been listening to books again ever since. First, I do not own a victor reader stream. But, I do own both a Booksense XT and a Plextalk Pocket PTP1. I bought my first Booksense XT back in 2010. And, 2 years ago, I had to have a friend bring me back a replacement from the USA because I made a mistake while using it. I live in India, and to keep it from swinging loose and banging into things while doing housework or when out in public, I used to keep it tucked into my shirt while doing things. The water vapor from sweating condensed on and corroded some of the parts to where it stopped functioning. So, since I used it to listen to many Bard books, I replaced it. Because I did not want to be without my Bard books, I also bought the Plextalk PTP1 as a spare and backup for my Booksense since it was cheaper than my XT. I started using the iPad (iPad 3 64Gb) in May 2012, and in December 2012 got an iPhone 5 64Gb. I use them both extensively, and I use iBooks, Nook, Kindle, and Bard for listening to books on them. I also use voicedream extensively. But if a book is available in Bard, for general use, I still prefer my daisy players, particularly my Booksense XT. First, both of the daisy players (book readers and more) can record not just as mp3, but can also record in daisy format. If you want to record lectures and bookmark places in your lectures to return to the highlights, that is important. Maybe there is an app to do that on the iOS products. But, I really do not know of one. There is also a second item regarding recording. With both of the daisy players I have, the only limit to recording time is your space on your SD card. There was no voice memo recording app that came with my iPad 3. Also, if you record on your phone and need access to it, keeping lots of recordings of lectures may result in space issues on your iOS device. And, there is no way to bookmark any location on the recording for coming back to it if you are using the voice memo app. Second, and this is a biggy!!!! Even when I do not listen to books, but just listen to podcasts and do other things on my phone I have problems with it getting through an entire day without needing to take time and recharge it. If you are out and about, that is not always possible. Therefore, I use my daisy player for that type of thing. But, if you are listening to books when out walking or riding on the bus/metro/etc., that does mean that you do have to have an extra device with you. For me, my Booksense or Plextalk is easy to use that way as they are light and do not take up much space. My phone is needed for other things that are more important than to run out the charge because of listening to books while at locations where I cannot charge it, or at times that charging is not really possible. Yes, it would be possible to carry a battery that can recharge it with me. But then you have the problem that if you are doing things, you somehow have to bundle that battery and your phone together so that you do not damage your phone connector or destroy your battery cable. Third, I normally listen to my books at close to 2 times the speed at which they were recorded. On every book, there are a few places where I have to go back and listen to that spot 2 or 3 times to catch it. And, sometimes I have to slow down the speed to fully catch a crucial word or 2. On my daisy players, that is much faster and easier. For instance, with the Bard app I have to find the button location with it talking over my book. Then, I have to double tap 2 or 3 times to get it back where I want it if I need to go back a minute or so, or double tap and hold, and then do that again to try to get where I want. (NOTE: I do like the idea that by holding down the back button, you can go back 5, 10, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, etc. But, still that is fairly slow compared to my daisy players.) On my Booksense, after I load a book, I normally change the forward and backup setting to 30 seconds. When I miss something, I can very rapidly backup and listen. If I need to slow it down, I can again do that in under 1 second by one or two quick taps on a button. Backing up to listen again is equally fast on my Plextalk pocket. But, changing speeds is a little slower than my Booksense, but faster than on the IOS Bard app. Those types of things are much faster on my daisy players. Also, the fact that the memory cards are replaceable is very good if you are doing studies. You can keep the data, bookmarks, etc associated with your old textbooks. You do not need to worry about the limitations of space associated with your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. Although I am not a student, I would consider that to be a very important issue. I was sighted when I went through my engineering courses in College. Certain books I kept because I had areas marked up in them and used them for references even when taking later classes or after receiving my degree in Chemical Engineering. If your space is limited by phone memory, you cannot keep the book and all the highlights/markings you made for studying. Also, being able to replace the memory cards allows you to keep the recordings and bookmarks associated with any of the lectures that you record and not need to worry about space. Many of my historical and other non-fiction books I like to keep on my card as reference with bookmarks at interesting or important locations. (For example, on the Journal of Lewis and Clark, I have their first encounter with a grizzly bear bookmarked as it is interesting and comical. I also have their experiences at Great Falls Montana bookmarked.) Then, I just take off the non-fiction ones that I do not want to keep, and I limit my fiction on my card to 20 fiction books at a time. I admit that I am not impressed with how the wifi access on my Plextalk pocket works, nor the fact that when you press the status button, it goes through all status details, including your wifi status, slowing down getting the information I want regarding how far along in my book I am. And, since the current operating system on it allows download of podcasts, but not of books, I really do not use wi-fi on it and turned the wi-fi off. Also, my booksense XT does not have wi-fi built into it, just bluetooth. Therefore, I agree that implementation of wi-fi could be better. But, I do not mind connecting to my computer periodically to transfer about 20 or so books that I have downloaded onto my computer for transfer. The question comes down this,.... would I purchase a new daisy player if something happened to what I have? I cannot say at this point. I do have the backup one if something happened to either my Booksense XT or my Plextalk Pocket. I hate the price on my Booksense. But, I suspect that I would end up purchasing a replacement if both daisy players died, especially if they updated some of their features, such as adding wi-fi, making the bluetooth easier to use, etc. But, there are definitely features on it that make it a useful tool to have in combination with my iOS devices. There are limitations to the types of things you can do on your phone at the same time. When you're recording, I do not know if you can do everything at the same time, especially if you're trying to do a long recording using your phone. I suspect that an attempted call in or a text in may affect the recording. Therefore, I feel there is still a benefit to having both types of technology.