VoiceOver
As you probably heard, this week Apple released its new Shiffie. The key new accessibility feature is VoiceOver.
Introducing VoiceOver.
Musically speaking, the new iPod shuffle is brilliant, thanks to an exciting new feature called VoiceOver. Say you’re listening to a song and want to know the title or the artist. With the press of a button, VoiceOver tells you as the music dips down. It even announces the names of your playlists. And when your battery needs charging, VoiceOver tells you that, too.
Practically speaking, you press a button on the headphone cord to prompt the iPod to talk to you. Different cues will give you title and artist or battery level or playlist information. All very useful and all very overdue. Between last year’s nano and this month’s Shuffle, Apple is well on its way to bringing an audio interface to its mobile devices.
Before recommending this to all the visually impaired music lovers out there, I have one concern that I have not seen addressed in the reviews so far. My primary reason for my iPod is to listen to books. Many visually impaired users offer audiobooks as a main reason for having iPods and other MP3 players. I am not sure how well the Shuffle deals with books. You can turn the Shuffle’s shuffle mode off. With the shuffle mode off, when you finish one part of a book, you move directly to the next part. This is very good, but how does the Shuffle handle rewinding, fast-forwarding and finding titles? This is where the Shuffle’s elegantly simple interface might fail the reader.
Still, it is inexpensive enough to have as a second device. The Shuffle for the gym and the nano or the Touch for the reading chair? Any thoughts?
If you find this post useful or interesting, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.
If you are interested in joining our mailing list, please submit your email below. 
This thread is way old at this point – like a year and a half – but if anyone stumbles across this post now, I use my iPod Shuffle primarily to listen to audiobooks so I’ve dealt with this issue. I’ve never had a problem with the files playing in order or with rewinding/fast-forwarding. The only problem I’ve had is with the VoiceOver… I cannot figure out exactly what the VoiceOver “reads,” but it’s sometimes hard to find a specific file. Once you get going, however, the Shuffle *should* save your place in the book each time you turn it off (I have had a problem with the auto-bookmarking feature occasionally) so you shouldn’t have to jump through the files too often.