Talking Recorders & Reading Devices — the extensible DAISY player

HIMS Sense Player

The verdict

The Sense Player is a dedicated media and book player built around physical buttons, not a touchscreen: DAISY books, NLS BARD downloads, Audible, music, podcasts, FM radio, and web radio all live behind a tactile button layout you can learn by feel. The clever part is that it runs Android apps for its services — BARD, Audible, and others come as installable apps rather than locked-in firmware — so the player gains new services without new hardware.

HIMS Sense Player — about $650 (OCR model about $795) · star rating unverified in our research (specialty-retailer product) · Blind pick — the pocket-sized successor to the Blaze ET, and the most extensible DAISY player HIMS has ever made.

The National Federation of the Blind's review singled out exactly this: the app approach makes it far more extensible than any player before it.

The OCR model adds a camera that photographs a printed page and reads it aloud, which turns mail, menus, and paper handouts into spoken text on the same device that already holds your library. That is the real pitch here: one pocket device that is your book player, your radio, and your print reader, with no phone screen to fight. It is smaller and lighter than most modern smartphones, and it is operated entirely by buttons and voice prompts.

Honest caveats: this is a serious purchase, and the screen reader for the Android-app side has limits — the NFB review notes you cannot navigate by page elements inside apps, and manually sideloading apps is hit or miss (SiriusXM worked for their reviewer; YouTube Music did not). Buy the base $650 model if you mainly want books and audio; pay the extra ~$145 for OCR only if you regularly need print read aloud. As of October 2026, specialty retailers listed the base player at $650 and the OCR model at $795 in stock.

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Last reviewed: October 2026.