H Hi everyone,
My name is Steve Johnson and I’m a severely sight-impaired iPhone user. I’m excited to share my first iOS app: Black Lens, now available on the App Store.
Black Lens was born from a problem I’ve had for years: I love getting outdoors, but taking selfies or photos in bright sunlight was almost impossible for me. With very limited vision and a washed-out screen, I could never tell if I was in the frame.
So I decided to build the app I needed myself.
Black Lens is a low-vision–friendly camera app that lets you take photos without needing to see the screen. A few features you might find useful:
• **AutoCapture** – detects a face, waits for stillness, and automatically takes the photo hands-free.
• **Mask Mode** – high-contrast black background with a bold green circle showing face detection. When the app is ready to take the shot, the circle turns red (inspired by Top Gun’s HUD).
• **Haptic Framing** – gentle vibrations warn when a face is near the boundary; stronger feedback when it goes out of frame.
• **Built-in spoken feedback** – announces events like “face detected”, “ready”, and “taking photo”, for users who prefer not to rely on VoiceOver.
• **VoiceOver adaptive interface** – if VoiceOver is on, additional clearly-labelled controls appear and are mapped to rotor navigation. No need for multi-finger swipe gestures.
• **Rear-camera selfies** – the app uses the sharper rear camera for higher-quality shots.
• **Simple gestures** – tap anywhere to take a photo, swipe to toggle features (for non-VoiceOver users).
I’d be incredibly grateful for your feedback, feature ideas, or suggestions to make Black Lens even more helpful to blind and low-vision users.
Here’s the App Store link if you’d like to try it:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/black-lens/id6754779190
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thank you to the AppleVis community for all the knowledge I’ve learned here over the years.
Steve Johnson
Creator of Black Lens
Instagram: @the_vi_guy
Comments
My review
This is an easy to use, and fun little accessible camera app. While there are a few things I would love to see improved upon, overall it is quite easy to use, and very self-explanatory. Below are my thoughts.
Speech Output
The speech output when detecting faces works well, I dare say even better than the default camera application, however it can get repetitive awfully fast, and will also speak over VoiceOver. So far that I can tell, there is no way of changing this at present. I would recommend an option to be able to mute the speech, or toggle between speech and sound effects, for this particular functionality. With that aside, it works as intended, and I was able to take a few selfies with very minimal effort. The countdown and auto capture is a very nice touch, and while I would not personally change this, it might be nice to add a toggle to enable/disable. This will be purely for preference sake, as it works well and toggling it on or off would not diminish the overall functionality of the application.
Button Labeling
There are two buttons toward the bottom of the screen, that seem to be labeled incorrectly. One is simply labeled "Back", and one is labeled "Swipe". Hearing those labels might be confusing to some, as both of them do the exact same thing; they activate the shutter and take a picture. I am not sure if this is "working as intended", or if it is a bug in the system, but I would recommend fixing the button labels.
Gestures
The gestures are pretty straightforward, and easy to use. However, you have to actually disable VoiceOver in order to get them to work. Keep in mind this is not at the moment a direct touch application, you have to disable VoiceOver to use gestures, but then you have to enable VoiceOver to use the on screen controls. I would recommend either making this a direct touch application, Where you have all gestures and controls accessible without the need for voiceover, or you make the gestures work with VoiceOver enabled, possibly through rotor actions. Otherwise, they do work very well, and as intended.
Pricing
This application is $2.99 in the US App Store. While that is not a bad price at all, I would recommend perhaps giving something like a 24 hour or a 48 hour trial, before purchase. Otherwise, I fear that many people will simply skip this, as they do not have the opportunity to test it before buying. Again, $2.99 for a lifetime purchase is not bad, at all, but please consider a small trial window, to give users a chance to test out your application before making the purchase.
Conclusion
Overall this is a wonderful little camera application. It is very accessible, straightforward, and easy to use. I think many users will be happy to have this and their arsenal of accessibility tools. Face detection is prompt, and pretty spot on. For those of you selfie lovers out there, you can't get much better than what this application offers.
Thank you, Steve Johnson Uk, for making such a thoughtful application.
promo code? and video recording support?
Hi,
Do you have a promo code for this app? I would like to try the app myself. also, can you add support for video recording in addition to photo taking? It would be pretty cool if the app would allow you to record video and have the same features just like when you capture a photo. And as the other poster stated the only way that you can use the gestures is with voiceover off.
promo code?
I would love to try this app do you have any promo codes? I did sed the dev a private message I agree about adding the rotor actions.
Camera
Just want to know if those issues were address regarding mislabelling the buttons. If so, will get it. This would had been perfect if my Bella the cat was still alive. Long live cats.