ITunes & JAWS

You can grab Blind-Tunes, a free alternative to the $75 J-Tunes. I can't attest to how well these JAWS scripts work myself--but they're worth a try, at any rate. You can grab a copy of the free screen reader, NVDA, which supports iTunes very well. It's not too hard to learn. They just added support for the iTunes store! It is also free, and works from a USB stick or other removable media without the use of authorization keys--it's worth a look! I use it as my primary screen reader! The website is: http://www.nvda-project.org Also, you might want to try organizing your iTunes library into lists. You can make it so that your artests are in one list, your albums in another, and your tracks in another. Any time you select something in one list, say the artist lists, it changes both the tracks or albums lists to include those songs--and only those songs. It's pretty neat. I'm not sure on all the specifics of all of the steps you have to go through to set this up completely, as it's been a while since I've done it, But I know the first thing to do is to switch the view to list view by pressing enter on it from the view menu. Just hit Alt-V and you'll be there. Arrow down and you'll find it. You can also tell iTunes to only sync selected playlists. I think you have to do this from the iPhone's listing in the sources list. So, arrow down until you come to your iPhone or iPod or whatever, and open it by hitting right arrow on the device-name. Then, arrow down to get to music. after that, hit tab until you hear something like "Music radio button." Press space on that, and then you can tap to sync selected playlists. The sync selected books option is changed by clicking on the books radio button and setting it from there. If you don't come to the option in books right away, don't panic. It's there, past the table of eBooks you may have on your device, and past the combo box of audio books. You'' get to it. You can make a plalist of audio books and that's where you'll go when you want to chick the box for it to be synced to your iDevice. You only have to check these boxes once--iTunes remembers your settings. If you're like me and often leave a few things on that never change, it's great. Even if you don't, you can always just change the content of a playlist called music or books and keep the box checked. As long as the playlist's name stays the same, iTunes doesn't care what's on it or that it gets changed--it'll just sync the new stuff and take the stuff you've deleted from it off the iDevice. I hope this has helped in some way. I'm sorry I can't give more detailed explanations. If you have more questions about the process--just post here. It might jog my memory. Hey, maybe when I figure all this stuff out again, I should write a blog post on AppleVis about how to set this up so that you can more easily manage your mcontent ion iunes. Note: I believe you might have to manage your music manually for this to work--in fact, I'm almost certain of this. I keep all my music in one folder, with artest/arbum folders, so this isn't a problem for me. And the same goes for my audio books. I'm still not sure on how to make iTunes referes it's library when I make changes to ID3 tags with programs other than iTunes. Ah, well, now I'm ranting. Good luck! iTunes can be really hard to get working the way you think it should! Wishing you well, Shersey

I am using windows XP and jaws 13 with the latest version of ITunes. I am able to sync my phone, search, buy apps and transfer data for apps like Read to Go. What functionality do you want to do? The F6 key jumps jaws from the search box to the main list of choices. I hardly use ITunes these days as I do everything on the phone itself. However, when I first bought my phone I was more comfortable attemting these things from my PC. Eileen

I don't use iTunes to subscribe to podcasts. I use a great podcast app called downcast. There are a couple of podcast catchers out there. This is the one I favor. Its around $1.99 US if I recall. Try it. You won't be sorry.