Sky+

What's New in Version 5.0

View photos from your phone or tablet on the TV if you have the latest software update on a compatible Sky+HD box.

Updated Homepage to replicate the Sky+HD box, including the dedicated Sports section.

Select the HD format of an on demand show easily with the new multi-format feature
Smart Series Link records all current and future series so you’ll never miss your favourite shows.

Voiceover functionality has now been extended, making navigating and using the app easier for the blind and partially sighted.

well I must say its very nice to see VoiceOver mentioned in the update notes, looking forward to seeing peoples comments on this.
I wonder how we got sky to listen given there track record, whoever got them to listen thank you.

It's been a long time coming, but it looks like sky have finally got their finger out. I haven't had a chance to test this all out extensively yet, but from my early experience it looks like they've done a superb job. Just a shame it took a while. The best compliment I could give this app is that there is a fair chance that the sky talker add on could now be irrelevant. Looking forward to hearing about everybody else's experiences. Cheers

Program synopsis's now read properly in the planner even when they haven't been recorded yet.
The only annoyance I have so far found is that if you access a programs details, if you tap the close details button you are returned to the top of the planner, mildly annoying but only mildly.
I would love to know if there is a dedicated accessibility address for reporting issues like this, as I have found regular tech support quite useless when it comes to accessibility in the past.
They could still improve navigating the channel list on the tv guide as this isn't possible with headings or table index, so you have to scroll a lot when trying to navigate the channel list.
I tried using the item chooser and although a table index is shown there you can't adjust its value.
I also found you can't use the delete action on the rotor to delete recordings, but I guess this function isn't well known so we would need to tell there accessibility people about it and how to implement it, luckily I know of a nice technical guide that describes it and how to implement it.

I just phoned up the accessibility team,
and they said that if you have feedback regarding apps the best thing to do is email it to
accessiblecustomerservice@bskyb.com
and it can be past to the accessibility manager.

I just tried installing the released 5.1 update for this app and found that it now crashes on launch on my iPhone 6 plus, I deleted and reinstalled same issue, interestingly at time of writing I was able to reinstall the older version which worked fine before installing the update, now nothing so I have reverted back to the older version for now. If your going to try it at least make sure you have the older version still in your iTunes library. Interested to know if anyone else can confirm this.

I've been able to get the app working properly without crashing on launch by deleting and re-downloading it. Otherwise, seems fine here.

I can confirm the new 5.1 update crashes on launch on my ipod touch. I originally thought this was due to the fact I've left my ipod on ios 7 until I read Alex's post. I won't be updating on my iPhone until what is surely a hasty fix or 5.1.1 is available.

Darren that's interesting did that and it didn't help, are you on a 6 plus with ios 8.3?

Very interesting indeed. I'm using a 6 with 8.3. I've opened it multiple times since reinstalling when it was crashing originally, but since the second install, It's behaving as expected. I can absolutely confirm the crashing on launch before I reinstalled it. How annoying. Only thing I can think of that may be different, is that I haven't logged in, and am merely verifying that the app isn't crashing. Then again, if yours is crashing, you won't have logged in either.

I'm happy to report that the release of version 5.1.1 seems to have fixed the serious crashing bug that effected 5.1 mentioned in the previous few posts. All appears to be working well again.

hi all with the latest version of the sky plus app, how please are people using the planner. for me it is now totally useless, given that i see fifteen genres of categories i assume that is for recorded content, yet when i am scrolling through it, voiceover keeps losing focus! how are others experiencing this i use iOS nine but have had this under iOS eight, too. tv planner works great but again, whys would ia have to sue 2 apps!!

I am not experiencing this on ios8, you could try contacting sky, but I wouldn't hold your breath, I contacted them a while back making several suggestions to improve accessibility like adding the delete option to the rotor for easier program deletion, the ability to delete entire series at once, and also adding of the table index to the tv guide, and none of these suggestions have been acted on. They appear to be complacent thinking they have done there job of making this app accessible with no desire to improve it. This was emailing my suggestions in and giving them over the phone. of course tv planner works great but the developer appears to have lost interest in developing it, I am not sure if he has even updated it for 64bit.

Going through the planner is a nightmare now I'm afraid. The only workaround is to try and find the programme you're after on the screen with your finger, then you can double tap and away you go as usual. I too am seeing these fifteen categories, which I didn't see before. That's nice in theory, but not as a trade-off for the navigational difficulties we now have. We've also still got the same problem with the remote. Am I missing something here, or is it not possible to fast-forward, rewind and so forth using the phone? it is possible for sighted people, and now that the TV Planner app seems defunct I really want this functionality on the Sky+ app. Has anyone else discovered a remote app that would allow us to have this functionality back? @alexWallis good luck with contacting Sky but I think like you say they are of the view that their job is done and hurrah. You could resort to writing to someone high up in Sky? not by email, but by letter? You could send copies of this letter to folk who might make some noise about it? in Touch springs to mind.

to be honest I have given up with trying to get sky to do anything, I mean even the rather useless RNIB seems to think sky has done its job. the last time I made some noise, sky called me back and took some very detailed feedback from me which they appear to have disregarded I am tired of running into a wall, if someone else wants to try feel free I would be happy to add my own comments in. Regarding planner navigation those categories have been there for ages, just make sure you have them set to all. navigating the tv guide in the sky app isn't pleasant trying to find the channel you want etc. I guess if sky are unwilling to do anything to improve things the only thing people can do is take there business elsewhere to someone like virgin.

@AlexWallis can't do that as Sky are very good at most things and, if you're a sports fan, the only place you'll get all Sky Sports channels is Sky. It's very annoying indeed this. Whom did you phone at Sky? Which department I mean? I might have a go and turn my talents as a barrister to the task. Not belittling your own efforts of course, i don't mean that. I mean you've probably done your shift when it comes to huff-and-puffery and it's probably time that someone else joined the rolling maul, to use a topical rugby world cup metaphore. Crouch! Bind! Set!

For the avoidance of doubt, I do know that 'Crouch! bind! Set!' are the instructions issued at scrum time, not on the formation of a maul, which typically follows winning the ball at the line-out. if only England had mauled more against Australia, could have been a different story. Then again, if only England had half a brain between them, we'd still be in the world cup now; our own world cup. Anyway I digress. If I can know to whom you spoke i will join battle again on this, because I am very hacked orf.

well the last time I did anything I complained loudly on twitter then they asked to call me back.
But prior to that I sent a very detailed long email to there quotes accessibility department and when they eventually bothered to reply it was a two line response I got back saying thank you for your feedback.
Baring in mind I had written a several page email which I might still have somewhere if you want to see it.
when they called me the last time they themselves even admitted there response had been rude.
I think its definitely time for you to bring legal talents into play we have tried being nice and constructive and they can't be bothered, I think its time to threaten them, and if they still do nothing crucially to carry it out.
I mean I even offered to beta test for them and to talk to developers directly about things that would be helpful.
as its not just the guide we don't have access to, we really need access to more of the boxes functions for example changing various pin codes, resetting the planner or rebuilding if it becomes corrupt etc, all of which I am sure is possible.
Other things we could do with are rotor support for deleting programs, and also a way to delete entire series in one go.
also access to the table index for navigating the tv guide would be nice like we have in tv planner remote.
all of which I have said to them in my written email and verbal feedback. Really I want access to as much of the boxes functions as possible not just the tv guide and planner. I mean who knows what other menu options there are that we might want access to but just don't know they exist.
Sky isn't alone though in not being bothered about accessibility Vodafone has issues with its app, but hasn't addressed any of them even though I wrote to the CEO I got a call bac then nothing.
Natwest also has issues with its app, and they don't even offer a direct way to contact developers the best they offered me was send it to our ideas box for consideration.
and yet a company like ebay seems very interested in accessibility issues though as yet they haven't addressed any of my feedback, but with them they seem responsive and I only sent stuff in around a month ago.

@alexWallis I need to see what you have written, then, so that a letter following a phone call can be put together. I don't envisage going down the route of threatening anything just yet, but a letter copied to the MD of British Sky Broadcasting Ltd (No, not Rupert Murdoch) might meet with some success. I'm still the only one mentioning these extra remote functions...am i alone in this? i'd love to be able to fast forward and rewind recorded TV like I used to be able to.

how are people navigating the planner? having to scroll a finger down the list and keep scrolling up with three fingers is ridiculous!!! tv planner has gone so yet again we are left out in the cold. what am i supposed to do now? lol

Maybe this is one for Peter White to get excited about on radio Four? I don't listen to the programme myself, but have been on it a couple of times. I doubt that Sky watches this thread, so maybe you could phone up accessibility and give them the link to it? I know I know, it's probably been done before, but I'm running out of ideas. I did say it should be an Applevis campaign of the month a while ago, but nobody seemed keen to back that horse, so to speak. So I'll try again: maybe this should be an Applevis campaign of the month?

Hi All. I am representing Sky on this forum and am keen to get feedback to help us improve the accessibility of our apps.
I'd like to get a better idea of where we are at now on this app, which I had understood to be fully accessible with VoiceOver, although requiring a few tweaks. The description above lists the version as 4.2, which is quite old, and says that it is only partially accessible. In October 2014 we released version 5.0 with massive improvements to VoiceOver accessibility, and are now up to version 5.3. My understanding was that the only section that may be described as inaccessible was the remote, but the TV Guide and other sections could be navigated fine, though there could be tweaks recommended.
Can you outline what are the outstanding issues people are experiencing?
I see some comments from late last year but would like to get as up to date a picture as possible.
Many thanks, David.

When deleting programmes from the planner, it is cumbersome to double click into a programme and delete it, especially if you have multiple programmes to delete. Please could you make it so that we could use the rotor function then swipe up to delete programmes? This technique works great in Facebook messenger for example. Also, when playing on demand content or a box set, it would be nice to be able to access the audio description track. Currently this isn't available either through the app or the sky box itself. This function is already available via Netflix and the BBC iplayer apps. And I agree with the post above, being able to swipe through the planner from title to title should be a basic fix I hope? Many thanks in advance for any of these suggestions you can implement.

HI and firstly thanks to Sky for reaching out to fix these issues. I, as many, have had difficulty before getting Sky to act on feedback so this is really appreciated.

Firstly I agree with the recent comments and have the following issues:
* I can't swipe through programmes on the planner page as a swipe left or right keeps you on the same programme or it looses focus back to the top of the list so I have to move my finger around to find what I want.
* Getting to the available space in the planner is only achieved through swiping when swiping back upwards, not if swiping down.
* The predictive search results are not read by voice over.
* On the remote screen the remote gestures are not usable with Voice Over running. At present I have to disable voice over, tap in the centre of the screen and I can then use the gestures as normal and then have to re-enable voice over again to use the app.
* The gesture guide is not accessible to voice over. For those who don't know, tapping the centre of the screen will pause or play the recording, swiping left or right will rewind or fast forward and the speed will increase the more times you move in the same direction. Swiping up and down will change channels.

To fix the remote screen can the developer use Direct Touch which would mean once a voice over user touches the area of the screen used for gestures, any gesture they use after that touch would be treated like normal swipes a non voice over user would use.

It would be uch appreciated if we could have access to audio description with the on demand content both on the box and via the sky go app. I'm not able to take advantage of many of the box sets as I do not want to watch them without audio description as many of the popular shows these days such as Game of Thrones and Dexter are very reliant on the viewer picking up information on screen that if you miss you struggle to keep track of the plot.

Finally, I was disappointed to hear that Sky Q does not have text to speech to enable us to use it out of the box. All new Samsung and Panasonic TVs including the lower range models this year, have text to speech as do some cable providers have talking set top boxes in the US. It's great being able to use the app but not everyone has the money to buy an iPhone or other apple device. Does the Sky Q app continue the drive to be fully accessible and what benefits do you see for blind viewers to switch to Sky Q instead of Sky+.

Thanks again and I can't wait to see what Sky can achieve with this feedback. I'm sure many will agree here that you can't put a price on being able to do something as simple as watching TV independently without having to rely on others. You will not have a shortage of beta testers from this site if that were possible and I'd love to get involved.

Keep up the good work and sorry for the long message.

Peter

Thanks very much for the feedback. I can reproduce both the planner and the predictive search results issues, and so will feed them back to the development team. To be sure I'm not missing anything, this is restricted to the Planner section, and does not affect the TV Guide section, correct?
I acknowledge the predictive search results issue of course, but just to be sure, you can navigate search results once you press the Search key which takes you to the full search results page, correct? At least this is what I am seeing.

Regarding the use of the actions menu in the rotor to allow quick deleting of shows, I am unsure of how this fits in with the custom controls and UI of the app, but I will certainly suggest it to the team.
The remote issue has been known since the app launched and we would certainly like to get it fixed, so thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks for the feedback about audio description. Sky is committed to providing audio description, but as you pointed out this is currently restricted to broadcast channels on the Sky box. Adding it to on demand content and apps is certainly our aspiration, and is on the roadmap. This is in the medium to long term however, rather than in the shorter term, so I can't give you a timescale at this time. It is certainly on the agenda though.
Regarding the Sky Q box having a speech engine, I will have to seek further clarification. However I believe when I asked about this in the past, the technical challenges were such that a decision was made to get the apps up to standard as the first priority. The Sky Q project took massive resources over a long period and such decisions had to be considered.

I read some comments above about the TV Guide and Planner sections with regards to the categories, i.e.. Entertainment, News, Sport etc.
To put it in context, the apples designed to look similar to the TV Guide and Planner on the Sky box, with tabs across the top for the categories.
On the app, only three or four of these are visible on screen at any one time. When the app first launched, VoiceOver would only read the ones currently on screen, with a three-finger swipe required to get to more categories. When you swiped right, focus would pop down to the first channel or show after the last on screen category.
In later versions, swiping right allows you to swipe through all of the categories, without the need for a three-finger swipe to reveal more categories. This though means that when you want to skip down to the channels or shows list, it is quickest to move your finger down to the list, rather than swiping through all of the category names.
Is one or other of these behaviours preferable?

Yes that's right about the planner and search results. The TV guide works great.

Regarding the suggestion of being able to use the voice over actions menu to delete programmes, it sounds as though you have access to use the app with Voice Over so can I suggest if your unsure as to what the contributor is referring to that you check out the messages app. When you have some messages on screen and voice over running, swipe to a message you should then hear voice over say actions available. That means you can swipe up and down to be able to select a variety of actions so for example in the planner, the actions menu could have options such as play, delete, add series link and on entries where there is more than one episode the option to delete entire series could be available. In the TV Guide the actions menu could enable the user to record the programme or play it if already recorded without even having to bring up the programme details screen.

Now if I could have a wish come true, being able to take advantage of any new IOS10 features such as Siri intergration would be nice or if we could use spotlight search to bring up programmes from our planner as happens with BBC Iplayer.

Thanks again for taking the time to acknowledge and take forward our issues.

I appreciate your honest answers about these issues. I assume there will be some licencing issues re the audio description and there is little point in having speech on a box that crashes even for sighted users and I'm sure we've all experienced our Sky Plus boxes messing up. I'd switch over to Sky Q straight away if the box had speech as I'm sure many would.

Again the only two issues that I can still find on the sky app is when scrawling on the planner we cannot scroll left or right and also with predictive text in search the options come up but cannot be read and yes they can be read when you click click search they come up grand and you can move through them easily enough and yes I agree with Peter that scrawling left or right through all the entertainment movies Hache D options I find is the better option

A fix if u can while in the planner i go into say the westwing it open into a epasode giveing me to watch Click that it open the gesture guide there is no way to return to planner only home screen A return to canna would be very handy at this stage because it is a long returned to the home page and then have to go into planner and going to the West Wing again to play another sure so can this be rectified thank you

First, as someone who has commented rather a lot on this app in the past, can I say how much I appreciate your direct interaction with us? I am very pleased to see that Sky is taking such a proactive approach.

I echo all that has been said about the remote. it would be very nice indeed to have full accessibility of this part of the app.

Regarding the TV guide, one thing I find rather annoying is this: let's say I have 'all channels' as my category, and I go down to, say, channel 402 and look at a particular programme's details. When I come out of those details I am back at the top of the TV guide, and can only get back to where I was by scrolling down page by page. I would prefer it to be more efficient than this.

Scrolling through the planner can be frustrating, and it can take quite a long time to find what one actually wants to watch, so I completely agree with those who have said swiping through the planner would be great. I also agree that it would be nice to be able to delete programmes using the actions item on the rota. The final point I would add is that I cannot consistently get the ap to tell me how much room is left on my Sky box.

I completely understand the problem with making audio description accessible on the app but hope you will be able to resolve this long-term. What would be great, however, would be to have a way of toggling audio description on or off by means of the app. At the moment, you have to fiddle around with the Sky services menu, which provides no audio feedback to a blind person. The upshot is that if, as happened the other day, an enterprising sighted family member disables audio description as it is annoying them, it is a disproportionate hassle to enable it again if no sighted help is available. I appreciate this might not be possible but thought I would put it out there as an idea.

Thanks again for interacting so directly with the community here. It's very much appreciated.

Its fantastic to see sky finally engaging with the community directly, I have been a frequent commenter on this app in the past, as I am sure you will see from my advocacy for the tv planner remote app which is great but of course users shouldn't have to buy an app with more limited functions just to enjoy better access.

So for me two issues stand out, one navigating recordings in the planner is problematic, often I have to scroll the screen to try and give recordings focus, and this is sometimes not possible if I only have a certain number of items in my planner,
also the way the system currently works where you tap on a show and it expands it isn't always obvious if the show has opened or nnot, often in order to navigate the planner I must slide my finger in a dragging gesture up and down or turn the rotor to vertical navigation but this frequently can't access all planner items.
Before I was able to just flick to the right after the categories list to navigate all shows in the planner, this used to work fine but was broken a few years ago in a sky update.

My second big issue with the sky app is actually navigating the tv guide, at the moment its not easy if I want to scroll through the guide to a particular channel, at the moment lets say I want to get to channel 553, I must repeatedly scroll the screen with 3 ffinger swipes up and VoiceOver will say rows x of x, x being a number, I must repeatedly do this in order to navigate to the channel I want.
Tv planner remote offers access to something called the table index where lets say I need to get to channel 553 I can flick down through this index to get to number 5, then at this point I only have a few scrolls to get to channel 553.

another issue I have noticed in the sky app is that the VoiceOver feature called the item chooser doesn't work at all, if this could be made fully usable it would make channel navigation so much easier, basically what the item chooser is is a way where you double tap 3 times with two fingers on screen, then VoiceOver brings up a list of all items on screen, and you can type into a search field what your looking for and the list of items is filtered.
at the moment the item chooser only works with visible items on the screen the ones immediately around your position, but if its working fully it should be able to work with all items in the app window.

One nice feature with tv planner remote is also that when navigating the tv guide program descriptions are read automatically by VoiceOver this doesn't happen automatically in sky, so I must open every programs details to see what it is then close them.

other issues I have found that are on the tv guide itself the buttons for accessing the rest of the week for a channel and the button to switch to the channel itself are named the same so I think this can be confusing for a VoiceOver user, so say you have bbc1 you have one button to actually switch to bbc1 on the tv guide, and another to bring up the rest of the week for bbc1 also called bbc1.
I also noticed that naming your sky box isn't accessible through VoiceOver, it doesn't respond when you try.
A final observation I have is that it isn't possible to mark programs to keep with the app or then to unmark them for keeping later.

Really though I would like as much control over my sky box through the app as possible, so for example access to features such as resetting the box or planner along with the option to rebuild it, as this currently isn't possible without sighted help, along with access to as many other functions that the remote can provide for things like setting pin numbers, configuring wifi etc. I think ideally this app should aim to provide as much access to the boxes features as possible to minimize the need for sighted help.

As others have said access to the actions menu with the VoiceOver rotor would be great for things like quickly playing a program, deleting it or even deleting a series in one go, you have no idea how frustrating it is say you have a 30 part series deleting one episode at a time.
I also like the idea of being able to use the app to toggle audio description, though I say why does it have to be limited to audio description, why not make it so the app can be used to toggle other accessibility features like subtitles etc.

are there any plans for sky to open up to beta testing? as obviously if improvements are planned I am sure it would be better if you could get our feedback during the development process to refine things rather than trying to make fixes then finding out they don't work quite right or have made things worse. I would be very happy to assist with testing if sky is considering this and amfamiliar with how testing works.