Comment by jawns

I'm curious why a simple CD player boombox wouldn't have been sufficient in this situation.

We have one with just four buttons (play/pause, stop, forward/next-track, rewind/prev-track) plus a volume knob. You can tell which button is which pretty easily based on their position.

It would be fairly easy to switch CDs and control the boombox without the use of sight.

I guess you could argue that by digitizing the CDs, it saves the person from having to change them out themselves ... but it also limits selection. (For instance, my local library has a wide assortment of CDs, but it would be a hassle if I had to rip each of them before I could listen to them.)

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By the way, anybody who's interested in building stuff that's accessible to the blind, you might be interested in the work of T.V. Raman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman), a Google engineer who himself is blind.

Check out this NYTimes article from a few years ago that tells a bit about his amazing story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/business/04blind.html?_r=0