Audio Players for the Vision Impared?

Panz asks: "Over Easter my 86 year-old grandmother asked my parents to help her buy a CD player. Normally, there would just be a technology barrier to overcome. Unfortunately, my grandmother has macular degeneration which prevents her from using traditional consumer electronics. What, if any, low-vision friendly CD/MP3/audio players are available? Is there such a thing on the market?" What CD/MP3 players have interfaces suitable for people who have less-than-stellar eyesight? Features that would be nice to have would be backlit displays, and larger than normal text displays.

How about Fisher Price?

[Cpyder]

Altough intended for kids, they usually have got huge, colourful buttons. I don't think this one [fisher-price.com] has got a display, but at least it hasn't got tiny buttons. Good luck!

Consider a talking-book player

[Andy_R]

If this is a degenerative condition, you might want to consider products aimed primarily at the blind or partially sighted, such as a talking book player - in Britain these can be bought from the Royal National Institute for the Blind here:http://onlineshop.rnib.org.uk/display_product .asp?prodid=2169

I don't understand the problem...

[FFFish]

What's the challenge of using a CD player?

You plug the CD Player into the back of the amp. You punch the amp's power button, the CD player powers on. You put the CD in, bump the drawer closed, and it plays. Punch a button, and it ejects. I rather doubt your gramma is going to be skipping songs and such, so the other buttons are irrelevent.

Paint the front of the tray red, paint the eject button bright yellow.

If you can't find a CD player that works as I describe, I've got an old Toshiba player that I'd probably be willing to donate to her, if you pay shipping.

HAL Home Automation

[skinfitz]

There is a product called HAL Automated Living [automatedliving.com] which using the optional Digital Music Center [automatedliving.com] addon may be ideal.

Basically you have all your CD's ripped into HAL's own playback program, but its all controlled by voice. You can either have it listening in rooms, or it can be controlled using the phone. It does other stuff as well like turn on the lights / TV / whatever you like etc. so may be useful overall.

I seem to recall an opensource type home automation system based on Linux so that may be worth investigating also.

Best of both worlds?

[zcat_NZ]

Verne uses his Linux computer with speech synthesiser to play his audio (mostly the soundtrack of science and space-related TV programs from Discovery channel, which he records via cron jobs since they run them at stupid hours)

The output from the computer is also fed into a small FM transmitter, so he can use an FM walkman or portable radio if he wants to listen while moving around. Unfortunately, there's no way of controllingthe audio thts way (ie skipping the ad-breaks)

Total cost == most of this stuff was being thrown away :)

The Archos Jukebox Recorder WITH RockBox

[Catharsis]

Recently, the Rockbox Open Source firmware replacement added voice support.

Considering that the rockbox firmware (which completely replaces the original (crappy) firmware) is free, multi-lingual, and has optionally enlarged fonts, I'd say go get one!

The Jukebox itself has a battery life of around 10 hours, and comes in 10-20GB versions, last I checked. Archos has recently been phasing these ones out of production, so you can find them cheap here and there, and off ebay.

Requisite reading:
Rockbox! [rockbox.haxx.se]
Archos [archos.com]

It also works with the Neo MP3 player which I don't have a handy link for.