We are pleased and excited to announce that voting for the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards of 2014 is now open.
This is our community’s opportunity to acknowledge the tremendous work by developers over the past 12 months in creating great and accessible iOS and OS X applications.
The shortlist for each Award has been compiled from the nominations that were submitted by members of our community.
We are pleased to announce that our community has chosen NFB-NEWSLINE® Mobile to be the next inductee into our iOS App Hall of Fame.
After an extremely close vote, NFB-NEWSLINE edged out its 2 closest challengers by just 4 votes ... once again demonstrating how important each and every vote can be!
When I’m not listening to punk rock, helping my dad set the thermostat, or reading audiobooks, I do occasionally make an attempt to contribute to society. I talk at local blind support groups about using technology.
I'm not of sound mind. I do not own a decent microphone and I am not an audio engineer. I do not record music or podcasts. I simply have thousands of audio files, captured and collected over a lifetime, that sometimes need just a bit of attention.
On May 8, Sprint released a new update to the Sprint IP Relay app. While the description only states that there are "Miscellaneous bug fixes", one of those bug fixes is very significant... it restores access for braille users. Until now, braille users have not had a reliable solution to access relay via their mobile devices.
We are pleased to announce that the latest iOS app to be inducted into our App Hall of Fame is Digit-Eyes Audio Scanner and Labeler.
For some time it was looking like this would be an extremely close vote, with several apps appearing to be in contention. However, Digit-Eyes ultimately won out as the firm choice of AppleVis users, gaining more than double the number of votes of its nearest challenger.
Interpreting peoples’ body language—particularly facial expressions—is one of those challenges that almost all blind people face. But soon, there will be an app for that.
At the end of each month, members of the AppleVis Editorial Team review all of the apps that have been posted to the site during that month--either for the first time, or where there has been a significant update--and decide which of these they think is the most noteworthy.
The AppleVis Editorial Team app picks of the month for November 2014 are as follows:
Updated to version 3.5.2 (now at version 3.6); November, 2014.
Within the last couple of years, many apps have entered the market specifically for iPhone users who are blind. They range from color identifiers, to VoiceOver-specific Facebook clients, to touch-typing apps…and everything in-between. Some people think a higher price tag for blindness-specific apps is reasonable, others do not. The answer, I think, lies somewhere in the middle.
Update 19 May, 2016: Facebook has today announced that automatic alt text is now available globally in English.
*** Facebook has today officially launched it’s much anticipated tool for automatically generating descriptions of photos posted to its site.
An incredible bit of news just hit the wire today--so huge that we wanted to let you know about it ASAP.
The incredible folks that created the biggest innovation to come to touch-typing for the visually impaired community--Fleksy - Happy Typing--released a statement today announcing that the app is now FREE.
An interesting and surprising piece of news today is that Fleksy has been acquired by Pinterest. What’s perhaps most interesting for the vision impaired, is that this may have positive consequences for those of us who remember just how revolutionary Fleksy once promised to be.
Fleksy - Happy Typing has broken all records to become the latest inductee into our iOS App Hall of Fame.
It's 50% share of the vote was more than double that of its closest challenger. This should perhaps be no surprise for an app that has been variously described as "revolutionary", "ground-breaking", "amazing", "awesome" and "a game changer".
A few months ago, the community of blind and visually impaired iOS users was thrown into an uproar when Fleksy split their apps into a new, updated version that was not Voiceover friendly, and an older version that was. Hundreds of comments, tweets, emails, and boos were posted, with some saying Fleksy was abandoning the blind community that helped it get off the ground by purchasing its original app, and others urging patience as Fleksy went through a transition and promised to reunite the two apps into one within six months.
What does it mean to make a truly accessible app? How can you go beyond meeting minimum accessibility standards and make something that VoiceOver users will find intuitive and enjoy using? In this post, I want to try to answer those questions from a user's perspective. I will not be covering the code you should use; instead, I am trying to describe what makes an app easy to use for me, as a VoiceOver user, and I encourage members of the community to add their own views in the comments.
This post is a follow up to my post from December, Braille Display Users Deserve Better From Blindfold Games. In this post, I acknowledged the efforts of Marty for speech users, but pointed out the lack of accessibility for braille display users. While the use of a display is a luxury for some, for the deaf-blind this is not the case, as a display must be relied upon for access to information on a mobile device.
For many of us -- hard-core internet surfers, RSS is a familiar term. By the same token, the phrase "RSS reader" isn't esoteric at all. But let me talk a bit about RSS and RSS readers before moving on to the main focus of this post. According to the Pro Blogger website: