Bibielz’ new device (a post with a PHOTO! 😀 ).

It feels like lately, the market of book players for the blind has been revived, if only for a brief moment. A lot of people predicted that they would soon become completely obsolete, taking into account the fact that now, a lot of blind people use their iPhones to access books and other media, which pays off more since you pay for one device that can perform the functions of several assistive devices, rather than pay double the money you’d pay for an iPhone just for a book player with some extra features. And it is quite visible that book players are becoming the domain of the elderly who have just lost their sight recently, or possibly students who need a more granular navigation inside their books than what popular reading apps can offer. Since I have very specific and perhaps a bit eccentric reading habits, about which I wrote more for example in this post, the switch to iPhone for reading books never really worked out for me, despite several attempts at ditching or at least limiting the use of my faithful PlexTalk Linio Pocket. Which I was ever so slightly worried about, because while my PlexTalk still works fine overall (perhaps except for a bit broken charger), its manufacturer appears to have ditched it a few years ago in that it no longer receives any firmware updates, and a lot of its features no longer work in practice, such as Audible which I describe in the post linked above. So I was kind of wondering what I’ll do when my current PlexTalk dies. It’s not like it, or other book players, are no longer available to buy, but it felt like maybe I should just keep trying to get used to Voice Dream Reader on iPhone rather than pay for some way over-priced device which doesn’t really offer anything ground-breaking for our current standards and isn’t even going to get updated. However, this year, I’ve already heard of like four or five different new book player devices coming out, which gave me some renewed hope. It looks like manufacturers of assistive devices are still willing to try and create products that can compete with a smartphone, or perhaps complement it in some meaningful way. So I slowly started to think that perhaps now is the time to get myself something new to replace the PlexTalk, given that the options have expanded so much this year, and a few felt actually worth considering for me.

 

The final straw that made me make up my mind was when Sofi’s computer (the desktop one that I had before I got the Mac that I had never-ending troubles with) broke. It didn’t break irreparably, but this event seemed to make Sofi realise that, actually, now that she’s in high school, she doesn’t really need a computer, let alone such a huge one. She did need a computer for some schoolwork in the past, but now it no longer is required, and she does almost all her personal stuff on the phone. This turned out to be a bit of a problem for me though, because I still used Sofi’s computer for my criminal activity of stripping DRM from Audible books so that I could read them the way I like – on the PlexTalk, of course. It doesn’t seem like there’s any software for the Mac accessible with VoiceOver that can convert Audible. This presented me with a dilemma: either I have to get a Windows virtual machine on my Mac, or buy some cheap laptop just to do all the things that are easier to do on Windows, or buy a book player that still supports Audible, i.e. its “enhanced” format, or just say goodbye to Audible and look for English-language audiobooks elsewhere/just be satisfied with ebooks. – I guess the first option would be the easiest, but since I was already thinking about possibly switching to a new book player, I decided to look more closely into the third option, feeling grateful for such a sudden influx of book players. 😀 Initially though it seemed really depressing because looking at their specs, it didn’t seem like any of them supported Audible! I didn’t even want to believe that, because a few of them had done it in their previous models, when Audible’s old format was still a thing. Surely they’d be able to figure something out with Amazon to accommodate Audible’s new format as well. I reached out to two companies whose devices seemed the most interesting to me except for their lack of Audible, and, sure enough, it turned out that one of them will receive support for Audible in a future firmware version, although it would be implemented in a rather unexpected way because the device actually runs on Android and instead of having native support for it, you will actually have to download the Audible app like you would on a phone. As it turned out, this was the device that I considered more interesting out of the two – SensePlayer OCR. – So, SensePlayer OCR it is!

 

A lot of people must have also found it interesting though, because when I contacted our distributor to order it, it was out of stock, so I had to wait a month or so for it to come. And it finally came today, yay! Actually I totally didn’t expect it today so I was in a bit of a shock initially. 

 

I haven’t really been able to use it much yet, because only when it arrived did I realise that I don’t have the right memory card for it. PlexTalk uses an SD card, while SensePlayer needs a Micro SD one, and I was absolutely sure that I must have some Micro SD card somewhere along with an adapter, but, well, if I do, I must’ve hidden it very well or something because it’s nowhere to be found. And I have all my books, music and everything on SD cards, so before my new SensePlayer can be of use for me, I’ll have to transfer the whole Bibiel collection, so I bought a Micro SD card with an adapter which should be here tomorrow. But I already know how to turn it on and off, so that’s a start, isn’t it? 

 

This SensePlayer thing is really cool, or seems to be from what I’ve heard and read, because it feels really modern compared to all the other available book players. It seems like HIMS (the company who make it) must have really thought about something that will make it a worthwhile purchase not only for desperate little changephobic Bibielz like me or newly blind/elderly/technophobic individuals, but also other blind people who will no longer be impressed with a simple DAISy, mp3 and txt player (DAISY is the format in which most talking books are made currently). For example, the extended OCR version has a built-in camera and is able to scan documents. I have the OCR version, even though I don’t actually plan on using it for scanning paper documents because I have a scanner specifically for that, but what I do like is that it can also recognise text in PDF files, and I often read PDF books that are originally images so that should be very useful. From some presentations that I’ve heard, it has a really good mic for a device of its kind. Devices such as PlexTalk always add their own internal hum into the recordings which makes them sound very bad. Plus you can even connect an external microphone to the SensePlayer which is really cool too. Or you can use its keyboard as an iPhone keyboard, which I can totally see myself doing a lot once I figure out how, ‘cause, well, I might be good friends with my iPhone now, but those who know me know that I’m still not super efficient when having to use it solely through the touch screen, although people have been saying that apparently it’s a bit slow so we’ll see whether I’ll prefer it over my standard Bluetooth keyboard or the Braille-Sense which can also work as an iPhone keyboard. Recently I’ve heard that it got a new feature which makes it possible to record phone calls. It’s not something that I’d often have a need for, but I know that there aren’t even many mainstream devices which do that so it’s cool that they think about such things. And like I said it is on Android which means that it’s going to be expanded to be more like an Android phone or something like that. While all that is great, the final reasons why I decided on SensePlayer though are the upcoming Audible support and support for multiple languages. The latter seems like such an obvious thing, but PlexTalk really didn’t do it. I got mine with a Polish and a British English voice by default, and to my knowledge there’s no way for a user to add, for example, a Swedish voice. But SensePlayer doesn’t pose such language limits. Well, it’s still not ideal, because they use Nuance Vocalizer voices, among which there is no Welsh voice for me, but I’m used to that anyway, because it’s the same story with Apple and maybe things will change over time and we’ll be able to install Espeak, for example, whose Welsh pronunciation is DESPICABLE, but it is always something so I wouldn’t sneeze at it.

 

This means I now have a proper Apple-HIMS ecosystem here, as Braille-Sense, my notetaker, is also made by this Korean company. The PlexTalk is probably going to spend its retirement years travelling around the country with my Dad, because he says he’d like to have some audiobooks to read while driving and PlexTalk is easy enough to use that he should learn it quickly, except the charger will need to be fixed somehow. 

 

I’ve already posted a pic of PlexTalk and Braille-Sense on this blog, which should be in this post if it’s still there and I haven’t deleted the photo files from WordPress, lol (except I had an older BrailleSense model back then but the one I have now is practically identical in terms of appearance). So I thought why not share a pic of SensePlayer as well, as a way of sort of spreading awareness about how some weird blind Bibielz read their books, and just so I have an excuse to post another photo on this blog, since I do it very rarely. So, below is the photo of my brand new SensePlayer OCR, taken by my Mum, but let me know if anything’s wrong with it or something, I post photos so rarely that I’m not even sure I know how to insert images properly. 😀