dating apps since there are some that are hit and miss

Most apps are not accessible. Sad but there it is.

Hinge has been usable recently. I wish Bumble would sort theirs out as I know a lot of people who have found some success on there but the one I keep going back to is tinder which has always been surprisingly accessible, and I've been pleasantly surprised by how many people actually do put text on their profiles as well as pictures. It's a clunky app, not just for accessibility. Occasionally it completely breaks, like a few days ago voiceover just stopped reading any of it so I deleted the app and re downloaded and it was better again. None of them are perfect, but tinder has been the one I've used the most in recent times.

Don't know if you're averse to going online, and I can't say if it's still accessible, but I met my wife on match.com around 12 years ago. I found the web site perfectly accessible. Lots of local folks were on it, too.

Good luck!

Bruce

For those not in the know, Tinder for quite some time now has had a Web-based version of its application that is far more accessible than its IOS counterpart. The Web app is even a PWA that can be installed as a shortcut on your desktop. It tends to work better with the Chrome browser, and can be found at https://tinder.com.

The app badoo is very accessible besides the pictures it’s completely accessible and the team will always consider accessibility for their blind users

I think if we are going to get these accessible we need to band together as a community and contact these companies. Plenty of fish needs to be contacted.

Maybe not about money but how easy they are to use and accessible.

The only apps I even tried to play around with were e-harmony and Christian Mingle. Neiter was accessible enough for me to keep around, and the one match I got from Christian Mingle ended up being nothing but red flags. I've tried meet up also, but that was pretty underwhelming as well. On the whole, especially as I get older, I'm happy to just stay single, but sometimes, I think it would be nice to find someone to spend time with at the very least and expand my social circle a tad.

I've sent Christian Mingle a long list of simple UI and VoiceOver fixes for the app, as well as resources on where to find the development resources to fix said issues. Not sure if they will take these into consideration, but they did tell me they want to make the app better. I listed the app in the AppleVis directory with the labels for the tabs along the bottom. You can use the app with VO, it just requires some workarounds and trial and error. Reading the profile text and messages was okay. Some difficulty in filling out the profile.

The eHarmony app is mostly VO accessible, however the scrolling in the messages drives me bananas. Their website is okay if you know how to set landmarks and jump around.

Good luck.

I wouldn't not date a blind person, but I would rather not!

This tend to happen due to the fact that sometimes a group with similar interest or jobs come together. Nurses and doctors and police tend to date each other. Social workers,and psychologist.

You are attracted to who you are attracted. Personally I'd not intentionally seek out someone with the commonality of a visual impairment as I think of it as one of the more boring parts of my character but neither would I go out of my way to avoid it. I just despise the trope that blind people go out with blind people, it's demeaning and defines us by our shitty disability rather than our wide ranging world experience. It is an artificial barrier that should be ignored... In my opinion, which will be different to others.

Anyway, gone way off topic here... However, I have been in contact with the developer of a new app, geek meet, which is based on finding romance through, in quotations, geeky interests. The App is not yet on iPhone but the developer seems keen to make it work for us and seems like a very good way of find others who like to vanish down the nerdy rabbit hole of shared cognitive passions... Which sounds much more fun that comparing war stories of an impairment.

Everyone, make sure your read this at least twice, apparently it's a new forum rule I'd not been made aware of.

Yes, I think that boils down to the choice of who you feel comfortable socialising with. I have no blind friends IRL, which wasn't an active choice, rather I found other social groups that interested me more because we had a shared interest, first music, then writing and gaming etc... I never felt that blindness was something I could bond over. Some people can. I guess this is why I find it hard to understand. Sorry if I've caused any offence. In my view, everyone's busted up some how, on the inside or out. We have it easier in a way because at least we have a name for it. :)

we've gone down the path of trying to pigeonhole people, haven't we? let me just say, as a barrister, the last person I would want to date is another barrister! Imagine the conversations over breakfast...all about admissibility of evidence, cross-examination and quantum of damages?

I have assiduously complied with the rule of reading things twice and must say that the second reading left me no more enlightened than the first as nobody appears to have said anything too complicated. By and large I agree with oliver; but I also agree that one can meet other groups of blindies if one wishes and that this is just one of many options that the traditional dating chap (I forget their username and am not committed enough to this enterprise to look back and refresh my memory) mentioned. Wouldn't it be ironic if there were a dating app specifically for blind people that wasn't accessible?

On a serious note, I met my fiancee through eHarmony. The app was mainly accessible although there were some elements that were not great...typically the part where eHarmony asks you to rank characteristics in order of importance. I tended to find myself telling my prospective date that such things didn't work well for blindies and so would she mind awfully skipping that step? In fact, nearly everyone with whom i corresponded on eHarmony was very relaxed about skipping stuff that was not accessible. Yes it's relatively expensive but that does weed out quite a few of the nutjobs. yes it takes a while to fill in but at least that shows it's making a reasonably serious effort to try and find you matches. Someone else mentioned match.com here and that one's not bad either, though the website in my experience was considerably better than the app. This was seven or eight years ago.

wehre I think blindies fall down is they don't bother themselves with getting decent pictures. You really, really need decent pictures for a dating profile if you want sighted people to be interested. You don't have to be dashingly handsome - but make sure you have pictures in which you look reasonably smart. A picture of you lounging around in shorts and a t-shirt with islands of last night's tomato sauce down it ain't really going to cut the mustard. if you have a sighted friend you need to use that sighted friend to find a decent picture of yourself for you, or else to take one. I appeared on eHarmony in a suit in all my pictures. There was one particularly good one of me on the terrace of the House of Commons.

I’m surprise nobody has mentioned OK Cupid yet. I find that one to find decently accessible

A really good point regarding pictures... I think this is the sticking point for many of these apps, accessible or not. Firstly, we do need good photos which, as blind people we don't hoard as much as sighted counterparts so maybe being mindful of that when out with sighted friends and family on an interesting day out. The other side of this is trying to find someone of interest one very picture oriented services such as tinder where, if we're lucky, we get a couple of vague lines giving us very little insight into the person appearance or personality.

Pictures are important for our potential matches, but also for us. What someone looks like is important, even for blind people. How someone carries themselves, what they get up to, the quality of their smile, how they dress, how they take care of themselves... So there is this almost incermountable barrier to the whole thing. A picture paints a thousand words so we're already a step behind when going on a date. They have already seen us, made assertions, right or wrong, based on our images.

This suggest that the data heavy services such as EHarmony should be a better pairing for us, though we still don't have that access to images. I've had success in outsourcing to friends, having them describe the images, though this does colour the situation with their own biases.

finally there is the issue of popularity of apps. Really we want a large pool of choice. I'm not sure how popular things like POF or EHarmony are these days when compared with things like Tinder or Bumble which, as stated, are heavy on images light on data.

By chasing certain services, accessibility aside, you are already making a choice of the sort of person you will potentially date because there are certain types of people drawn to certain services based on its engagement and feature set.

What would be good, for the larger services such as Tinder, is for use to be able to have an assigned assistant, someone with limited access to ones account that can help us, almost a be my eyes situation for dating apps. Might be worth a suggestion to people like tinder and bumble who do seem open to ideas. If they can offer such accessibility setting it will help them boost their profile... See what I did there?

I met my current guy by walking up to him, hitting on him then kissing his cheek before he left. I wouldn't date a blind person for one definitely shallow reason. I'm not dealing with the issues we face and have to deal with whoever having the same or worse access issues. I am with my boyfriend because he and i are great together not because he's sighted. Oh and for the LGBTQ+ I'd be curious if the apps like Grindr are accessible if they have worked for you if you choose to tell us.

Hey, you raise yet another interesting point. Though some of the apps struggle with accessibility, tinder as an example when trying to add images, their website counterpart is usually more usable. I know bumble also has a website interface, hinge does not.

So, maybe it is worth looking at both. Sometimes with these things it works by a combination of routes, EG, website to set up your profile but easier to filter potentials via the app.

Hi,
I am Yosephina who are doing a study with my group at Hyper Island Sweden, about digital accessibility for people with visual impairments on the dating app Tinder. We want to find better digital solutions for people with impairments on Tinder. Therefore we are looking for people that want to participate in an interview.
You don’t need to have used Tinder before but it would be nice if you have used any other online dating application or website. You need to have an interest in online dating. The interviews will preferably take place in Stockholm or online during this week. We will use the information from the interview.
The interview will only be for educational purposes (not in collaboration with Tinder) and we do not publish names, photos or other personal information. If you or anyone close to you has an interest in participating in this survey, please contact us via email: yosephina.huwae@hyperisland.se