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Home | Your community | Blogs | Sandi Wassmer | Why the iPhone 3GS made this visually impaired girl happy

Posted in Sandi's blog on 22 June 2009 | 7 Comments

I was in geek heaven when I found out that Apple were bringing out an accessible iPhone with plenty of features for visually impaired users. And calling it an iPhone is a bit of a misnomer, but I guess they couldn’t really call it the iPhone-iPod-iEmail-iInternet-iCamera-iEtc now could they?

I am not going to do a full product review, as these will be flooding the internet over the next few weeks, but I will give my humble opinion on my first impressions of this dandy little piece of technology.

Broadly, I would say that for severely visually impaired (blind) folk with useful vision who do not yet require a screen reader, the iPhone is seriously worth checking out, but for those people who rely on a screen reader, I would suggest waiting until Apple iron out some issues over the next few iterations of the iPhone, unless you have a superhuman amount of time and patience. And for those who use magnification in conjunction with a screen reader, this will not be for you either as Zoom and VoiceOver cannot be used together, as they use the same touch screen gestures.

Zoom + Giant + Landscape and Go!

Zoom is the feature that allows you to zoom into the screen wherever you are on the iPhone. Two taps of your three middle fingers and you’re in zoom mode. You let your fingers do the walking to move around the screen and then tap twice again to exit zoom mode. I have set the font to giant for email messages and as the screen automatically changes to landscape when you rotate it, this is just perfect for me.

Voice Control

Voice Control is speech recognition and does not require any programming by the user and will, apparently, just respond to your voice accordingly. Well this is where it starts to get a little unstuck. It worked OK when I, with my clear Canadian accent, was using it to find contacts to call, but it did make a few understandable mistakes. However, when my husband, who has a hybrid Cambridgeshire-London accent, had a go, it turned into a bit of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. And when I then tried to use it to play songs on the iPod feature, it went downhill pretty quickly. I said "Play Miles Davis" and it decided to call my friend David. We both tried it a few times, sometimes right and sometimes with hilarious results, but definitely not something that you would want to rely on.

VoiceOver

VoiceOver is the screen reader. It is a woman’s voice and it does not pierce your eardrums like some other screen readers and is, in fact, quite pleasant. But, and this one is a big but, you have to interact with VoiceOver using the touch screen, which is completely open, with no preset functionality or commands that you would expect to have when interacting with a screen reader. So, I have coined it 'press and guess'. I mean eventually you would probably find what you want, but when and how many people would you accidentally call before you did? Although, in theory, it sounds straightforward and should give you a lot of freedom, in my opinion, the only way that this would be ok for totally blind users would be to have a peripheral keypad or tactile device with in built commands that assist navigation and use.

I think it is a very interesting start and I look forward to seeing how Apple respond to the views of disabled users as their accessibility features are refined. It has given me a new lease on life as I had virtually stopped using my phone and my iPod, and as my iPod holds my music and audio books, this now means that I can phone, text, listen to music and read again all by my lonesome. This is a really big deal.

If you do want to have a play with it, I would suggest researching the features that you want to test and find out how they work before you head to the Apple store, as when we were there at 8am on Friday morning, the staff were using the iPhone 3GS for the first time and had not been trained on its accessibility features. As the furore will have probably died down by now, I would book a Personal Shopping Experience. This way, they will have time to brush up on their accessibility knowledge before you get there.

Check out the Accessibility Solutions for iPhone on the Apple website and please post your views and experiences here if you get your hands on one!

About Sandi

Businesswoman Sandi Wassmer registered blind in 2008. In her blog, she shares with us the 'shenanigans of visual impairment'.

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