Posts by Lysette Chaproniere

The ChatGPT app has found a place in my iPhone's dock. I use it for many things, both serious and fun. Part of me is convinced that it's going to turn into Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There it is, brain the size of a planet, and I'm constantly asking it to answer very simple or repetitive queries. Yet, it always remains eager to assist with any question.

AI is a vast topic, and Morgan has already written an excellent post about it for AppleVis. Here, I want to explore how AI models have the potential to increase accessibility, both now and in the future. I'm calling it an exploration because I'm still discovering and experimenting with the capabilities of AI models. It's also a chance for you to explore with me, to tell me in the comments how you're using these models, what has worked well or hasn't, and your hopes and fears for the future of AI accessibility. I'll be mostly talking about ChatGPT, because that's what I'm most familiar with, but feel free to discuss other models and AI apps in the comments.

Describing Images, Real or…

It was a Thursday morning, and I was teaching a seminar to first year undergraduate students. I divided the students into three groups, then sent each group into a separate room to spend fifteen minutes discussing the material. Ten minutes later, I was still in the main room. My usual practice was to visit each room in turn, to listen to the students' discussion, answer any questions, and prompt them if everyone was a little too quiet. On this occasion, however, I couldn't find the entrance to the rooms. I'd never had this problem before. At this rate, the time would run out before I'd had a chance to check on any of the groups. I could only hope that the students would be too engrossed in their discussion to notice that I hadn't visited them. What could I do? Each seminar had three of these discussion sessions. Would I be able to find the secret entrance before the next one? Had the students locked me out because they had treasure they wanted to keep from me? Or was it a secret weapon? Were they plotting to take over the university? The world?

Just before the time was up, I found the way in. It occurred to me that the "5 participants" button might in fact be the button…

Much as I love VoiceOver and everything it has done for me, at times, it doesn't quite behave as I'd like it to. Those are the times when I think VoiceOver should be put on Santa's naughty list. Sometimes, it gets distracted, like the time when I was editing a document in pages on my iPad, and VoiceOver kept getting excited about the page thumbnails. Yes, VoiceOver, I'm aware that page thumbnails exist, and I'm sure they're the most awesomely amazing thing ever, but can we please stop jumping to them and stay focused on the document? I'll have to turn them off to remove the temptation. At other times, it has the opposite problem, getting so focused on one page element that it stubbornly refuses to move. It lies to me, telling me there's nothing else on the screen as I flick, but as soon as I start exploring the screen by touch, it suddenly decides to start telling the truth.

Among the gifts apple generously bestow upon us in their software updates each year, a few unwanted presents always creep in. Bugs. Alongside all the new features and added emoji, there's always something VoiceOver doesn't report, or a time when it talks too much, or a place where focus keeps…

To encourage us to stay at home and get creating, several developers are giving away their music creation apps for free Since so many visually impaired people are musicians, it would make sense for these companies to incorporate accessibility into the design of their apps.

Far too often, however, for screen reader users, music software is difficult to use at best. On iOS and iPad OS, developers usually take advantage of the touchscreen to create a visually appealing interface, sometimes with controls that look like what you'd find on an analogue synth, mixer or other gear. If these controls are non-standard, VoiceOver won't be able to interact with them unless they have specifically been made accessible. If you're working with an on screen instrument, you want to touch the instrument and instantly hear it play, but VoiceOver users double-tap where other users tap once, so touching an instrument will announce what you've just touched, but won't play the note. Apple has provided a solution to this problem: developers can designate an area of the screen…

In late 2017, I got my first iPad, and started using it as a laptop replacement. I'm sure this would've been surprising to my younger self. When Apple launched the iPad, I thought it was pointless. It's a big phone that doesn't make phone calls, I thought. But then, I didn't think I'd ever be able to use a touch screen. Apple can prove me wrong.

So why did I decide to get an iPad? I'd been using Windows for many years, but never liked Windows 10 very much. My Windows laptop was getting slow, and would sometimes get itself into an endless loop on startup which I usually couldn't exit without sighted assistance, because my screen reader hadn't launched yet. Meanwhile, my iPhone never had that problem. VoiceOver was always there for me, and if my phone ever crashed, it was up and running again within a few seconds. My phone could do virtually everything my laptop could do and more. Since I had become dissatisfied with Windows, and getting another iOS device would be easier and cheaper than getting a Mac, I decided that an iPad would be a good solution.

With the upcoming launch of iPad OS, I'm expecting that the iPad will work even better as a main computing device…

I flick around the screen, double-tapping when I want to select something. As I do so, VoiceOver's speech comes through my Aftershokz headset, which I wear most of the time. That makes me a cyborg, or so I'm told. Nothing is showing on my screen. "Is your phone on?" One of the students on my course at university once asked me, as I called a taxi. "The screen is black." Or as one train manager once remarked, as I was searching for my E-ticket to show him, "That phone doesn't look very awake." Of course, I turned my screen on, so he could see it, once I had my ticket displayed in the app.

It's a strange thing, the iPhone. On the one hand, there's nothing different about the iPhones blind people use. People are often surprised to hear that VoiceOver and other accessibility tools are on every handset. It has given me access to more mainstream services than I had previously. I buy books from stores that don't cater specifically to blind people, and I require no special equipment to read them. Even apps for the blind such as Seeing AI run on the same hardware every iPhone user has.

And yet, the way we use our…

My book collection takes up no space. With my phone in my pocket, and wearing my AfterShokz headset, I have hundreds of books to keep me occupied wherever I go. And when I buy new books, I don't need to worry about whether I have enough room for them on the shelves.

That's quite different from the braille books I was given to read as a child, where even the shortest novel took up several massive volumes. Wading through all those volumes was daunting. Later on, I learned about the digital library of audiobooks from the RNIB in the UK. But although they had a wide selection of books, it was a limited range compared with what I have access to now.

Once I got my first iPhone, millions of books were suddenly available to me, and I could buy them at the same time and at the same price as everybody else. I started reading more than I had ever read before. Now, when I hear about a book I like the sound of, I can usually find it in an accessible format, however popular or obscure that book is. I've used two ebook apps: iBooks and Kindle. I'd recommend both, although I more often use Kindle because they have more books and are sometimes slightly cheaper…

Apple's commitment to accessibility has made life easier for large numbers of visually impaired and other disabled people. Gone are the days of buying a Nokia phone and having to send it away and wait weeks for Talks to be installed. We have devices that we can use immediately after buying, without installing an expensive screen reader. Our devices include accessibility settings to accommodate several different disabilities. Many app developers have admirably taken on the challenge of making their apps not just minimally accessible, but easy to use with VoiceOver and other accessibility settings.

These are all huge steps forward, and we shouldn't forget the progress we've made, or the hard work it has required. Even so, the accessibility of Apple devices is not perfect, and so long as there is still room for improvement, we should speak up when things aren't working quite as they should be. In that spirit, I want to suggest what I think would be a natural next step for Apple: they should include some accessibility requirements in their app store guidelines. They should require developers to meet minimum accessibility standards, not just for VoiceOver users, but for…

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. Please note that I am assuming you already understand the basics: why accessibility is important, what VoiceOver is, and some of the most common gestures for navigating around the screen. If you do not already know this, please refer to Apple's iOS accessibility page. My focus here is on iOS, but some of the general principles will apply to other platforms. This post is almost exclusively about accessibility for blind users, but if you are a user with another disability, or with some remaining vision, I encourage you to leave a comment explaining what developers can do to make their apps easier to use for you.

How to Test Your App…

Every writer knows the feeling: you’ve just sat down at the keyboard, ready to write your next masterpiece. Suddenly, your mind goes blank. What seemed like the perfect idea late last night now seems impossible to put into words. Or perhaps you have no ideas at all and you wonder how you’ve ever managed to write anything. Unfortunately, your iOS device can’t write your articles, essays, stories or blog posts for you, but combined with a bluetooth keyboard it can make your writing life a little easier.

The app store offers a range of writing apps, from basic note takers to more complex word processors, each with its own unique feature set. Some, such as Apple Pages and Microsoft Word, allow you to format your text as you write. I prefer to use Markdown, a set of characters for formatting plain text. If you are unfamiliar with Markdown, you can learn more about it by…