7 Little Words: Word Puzzles

this game is fully voice over friendly now with ios 7, and all buttons are labeled. some new features of the game are...the word "solved" is placed next to the cule that is correctly guessed. The guess button pops up after the word choices have been made, no need to swipe to find it. There's a "menu" button to make puzzle choices you want to play. The game seems to be more stable in the sense the letters or clues do not loose focus after guessing a clue. If you have purchased a puzzle set, it keeps track of the ones you have played by indicating "sloved" by the number of that puzzle. I really enjoy playing this game. I had to do nothing to setup the game after updating to ios 7.

I love to start each morning by solving the free daily puzzle. In addition, I've purchased every single puzzle pack that's been released. I haven't really played the packs much, but I love supporting fully accessible apps like this as much as possible.

This is the only game that keeps me coming back. I've always been verbally skilled, so it's nice to have a fully accessible game that makes me think, but not too much. It's the right amount of puzzling and ease. Part of it is just deductive based on how letters are arranged. It's pattern recognition, vocabulary, and some obscure knowledge. Cerebral types should give this a try.

Hello,

After the new update, I heard new sounds and the game was slower. I got a prompt which I didn't read, because I was hurried, and I pressed no. I thought the game will be normal again, but direct touch was on and I couldn't turn it off. Besides, I heard no voice as before. Is there a SAPI voice which is implemented in the game? And how could I turn it back on, or how could I use the app with VoiceOver like before?
Thanks.

I am unable to use this app anymore. Nothing shows up on the screen, the rotor doesn't work, and there was a brief message about direct touch but Voiceover interrupted it and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. It doesn't matter, the rotor isn't working so I can't find direct touch anyway. Also, it's very laggy.

I finally somehow found you can enable accessibility by double tapping with three fingers on the screen, but it's very laggy. I couldn't complete a single puzzle. I'm very disappointed. It was perfect as it was before, accessible with VoiceOver. I hope it will be fixed soon.

I wanted to provide some context about the latest version of 7 Little Words and some better instructions of how to navigate the app.

This version of 7 Little Words was designed so that we can have one build in a software called Unity that works across both iOS and Android. As a small developer we could not keep the app updated across both platforms and this allows us to keep everything up to date.

One of our biggest worries in making this transition is that the we cannot offer the native Voice Over experience across both platforms. We have deployed the most popular Unity Accessibility plug in and hired a blind accessibility consultant to help us tailor the experience to make it as close to the Voice Over experience as possible.

If you have used Voice Over in the past on your device, the first screen you get upon install says it looks like you use voice over and would you like to continue to have text to speech support. If you swipe right to highlight the "Keep On" button and double tap the screen to select it, then you will be in our version of Voice Over. If you by mistake turned this off, please reinstall the app and it should prompt you again.

Once you are in the game board, the functions on the game board for each puzzle are relatively similar:
* swipe right and left to advance through the screen elements as before, but now you can swipe down and up to jump between the major screen sections (back button, clues, answer/spelling, tiles)
* use a two finger tap to switch between reading by word or letter and two finger swipe to advance through each clue
* when you select a tile as part of an answer, you remain in the tile section, which should reduce the number of swipes you need

We realize that we have done a poor job of explaining these changes in the first roll out on version 7.0.11. We hope to make these instructions more clear in our 7.0.12 release that will come out later this week.

We also found that the two-finger swipe to advance through clues by word or by letter sometimes was being interpreted as a two-finger tap. The 7.0.12 release will change this to a three-finger tap to select to read by word or letter and a two-finger swipe to advance by word and letter.

In additional feedback from our users, we realize that when reading by letter, we do not currently provide the phonetic word for each letter (for example, B, Bravo). In the 7.0.13 release we will be adding this feature.

We also understand that our latest release may not work with Braille readers or some bluetooth keyboards; we have not designed the app to work with these devices at this time.

We want to thank all of you for playing 7 Little Words and appreciate your feedback to make the game more accessible. Please contact us in the app under Settings and then Email Support if you are having other issues with the update and we will do our best to optimize your experience.

I was very disappointed when they changed this app. The app before worked perfectly fine, it had no problems and was very simple to use.
Now, you need to turn on accessible features. When you open the app for the first time it comes up with a notification that says some thing along the lines of your using voice over do you wish to activate accessibility mode. If you miss this however you need to use the shortcut 3 finger double tap I believe. I didn't know about that at the time so I had to reinstall the app to get it to work.
This then turns the app into something that is accessible with direct touch. The problem with this is the following:
The speed of movement is laggie. If you swipe twice quickly it doesn't read even though its made the noise.
You can't use your voiceover router to read letter by letter.
You have to use other gestures to navigate the screen. But the problem with these are that they are extremely slow in activating. They have turned an app that was extremely swift and able to navigate and explore into a clunky slow app that is no longer fun to use.
They have also not made a note of any gestures that work within the app.
I will admit that I used to play this game every day as a chill out before bed. Now, sadly my routine is gone all wrong. Please if the developers read this, change it back!!

I've been playing Seven Little Words for years, with never any access barriers. Suddenly today the site identified me as a VoiceOver user and suggested I try their new touch screen mode. I found it much less user friendly than before, and even though I deleted the game and reinstalled it, the new mode seems to be a requirement. When I tried not to go into the touch screen mode, the game became completely inaccessible. Has anyone else experienced this? Can we beg the app creators to go back to the old way?
Debbie Stein

This app is now garbage when used with braille. My rating in the App Store just dropped from 5 stars to 1. It's a win-lose for me. I used to enjoy this game very much. That's the loss. The win is that I've found a perfect example to show people how when something is designed for use with VoiceOver, it won't always work with braille.

The only way you can play this with a braille display is if you use the touchscreen to flick or touch the area of the board that you want. You get a brief VoiceOver announcement which flashes on the braille display and is gone. No way to play this with a Bluetooth keyboard either. I guess whatever testing was done wasn't carried out very thoroughly. DeafBlind people already have a limited selection of games they can comfortably play, now there is one less.

I've been playing 7 Little Words probably since I first got my iPhone in 2011. Now after their update last year I am sorry to say it is completely unusable with a braille display. I loved listening to an audio book whilst keeping hands and brain occupied at the same time.
A suggestion for Blue Ox: Put a legacy version back on the app store for those who don't like the new design.
Anything coded in Unity generally sucks and it should be abandoned. With extreme prejudice in my opinion. It doesn't need to look pretty, but if you could put a legacy app up there and find a way to keep updating puzzles that would make a lot of us quite happy I feel.
I have hearing loss on top of being blind and find games that require stereo headphones etc a total chore at best and a complete turn-off at worst.
Blue Ox: please please find a way to let us use Braille Displays again without touching the screen. I am totally gutted that what used to be one of my very favourite apps has fallen so far down the list.

With all that grumpyness out of the way, does anyone have recommendations for similar apps to 7 Little Words? I need non-timed, or with a setting to turn off the clock; ability to use a braille display or bluetooth keyboard and of course native VoiceOver support. Thanks for any ideas.