Speaking your iPod’s mind Considerably under-hyped is the 4G nano’s new Spoken Menus feature, which actually ‘њreads aloud’ќ as you browse the iPod’s menus, offering nearly-complete navigation even if you can’t see the iPod’s screen.
Designed to increase the nano’s accessibility for those with vision issues’”and, indeed, between Spoken Menus and the option for larger type, the 4G nano is the most-accessible iPod yet’”the feature will also appeal to those who insist on navigating their iPod’s menus while speeding down the highway (and, more important, make it safer for those of us sharing the road).
After enabling Spoken Menus in iTunes, iTunes uses the text-to-speech functionality of Mac OS X or Windows to generate audio files for the names of most standard menus and, impressively, for browsable metadata for every item on your iPod: track names, playlists, artists, albums, genres, and so on. It even creates sound files for the text of some dialog screens; for example, the confirmation screen for deleting a voice memo.
(iTunes uses whichever voice and speaking rate you’ve chosen in Mac OS X’s System Preferences or Windows’ Control Panels.) iTunes then copies these audio files to the hidden system area of the iPod. This feature works surprisingly well for alphabetically-sorted lists; I was able to easily browse to a particular playlist, artist, or song. It’s less effective for browsing long playlists that aren’t sorted alphabetically, unless you’re quite familiar with the specific track order.
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