We are pleased and excited to announce that voting for the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards of 2014 is now open.
This is our community’s opportunity to acknowledge the tremendous work by developers over the past 12 months in creating great and accessible iOS and OS X applications.
The shortlist for each Award has been compiled from the nominations that were submitted by members of our community.
We are pleased to announce that our community has chosen NFB-NEWSLINE® Mobile to be the next inductee into our iOS App Hall of Fame.
After an extremely close vote, NFB-NEWSLINE edged out its 2 closest challengers by just 4 votes ... once again demonstrating how important each and every vote can be!
I am thrilled to share some potentially great news - with the upcoming release of macOS Sonoma 14.2, Apple may finally have fixed the longstanding “Safari not responding” bug that causes repeated temporary freezes for many when using VoiceOver on a Mac.
Today is the Eighth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). This day has been set aside "to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) access/inclusion and people with different disabilities." This according to the above linked web page on GAAD.
I'm not of sound mind. I do not own a decent microphone and I am not an audio engineer. I do not record music or podcasts. I simply have thousands of audio files, captured and collected over a lifetime, that sometimes need just a bit of attention.
On May 8, Sprint released a new update to the Sprint IP Relay app. While the description only states that there are "Miscellaneous bug fixes", one of those bug fixes is very significant... it restores access for braille users. Until now, braille users have not had a reliable solution to access relay via their mobile devices.
We are pleased to announce that the latest iOS app to be inducted into our App Hall of Fame is Digit-Eyes Audio Scanner and Labeler.
For some time it was looking like this would be an extremely close vote, with several apps appearing to be in contention. However, Digit-Eyes ultimately won out as the firm choice of AppleVis users, gaining more than double the number of votes of its nearest challenger.
Interpreting peoples’ body language—particularly facial expressions—is one of those challenges that almost all blind people face. But soon, there will be an app for that.
'Hope' is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—
I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.
At the end of each month, members of the AppleVis Editorial Team review all of the apps that have been posted to the site during that month--either for the first time, or where there has been a significant update--and decide which of these they think is the most noteworthy.
The AppleVis Editorial Team app picks of the month for November 2014 are as follows:
Updated to version 3.5.2 (now at version 3.6); November, 2014.
Update 19 May, 2016: Facebook has today announced that automatic alt text is now available globally in English.
*** Facebook has today officially launched it’s much anticipated tool for automatically generating descriptions of photos posted to its site.
Fleksy - Happy Typing has broken all records to become the latest inductee into our iOS App Hall of Fame.
It's 50% share of the vote was more than double that of its closest challenger. This should perhaps be no surprise for an app that has been variously described as "revolutionary", "ground-breaking", "amazing", "awesome" and "a game changer".
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.
This post is a follow up to my post from December, Braille Display Users Deserve Better From Blindfold Games. In this post, I acknowledged the efforts of Marty for speech users, but pointed out the lack of accessibility for braille display users. While the use of a display is a luxury for some, for the deaf-blind this is not the case, as a display must be relied upon for access to information on a mobile device.
For many of us -- hard-core internet surfers, RSS is a familiar term. By the same token, the phrase "RSS reader" isn't esoteric at all. But let me talk a bit about RSS and RSS readers before moving on to the main focus of this post. According to the Pro Blogger website:
***Note: This post was written in 2012. Unfortunately American Heritage Dictionary 5th Edition became totally inaccessible in July 2016. So what you read below is no longer valid and only reflects history. To see what happened to this invaluable app and how it became inaccessible again, please visit this page. Thanks.
It feels like losing an old friend. Or perhaps losing one's love of life. But American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language was my friend in the world of iOS apps and my love in the world of dictionaries. So going to bed one night with an awesome dictionary which ticks all check boxes in terms of accessibility and getting up the next morning, hearing about the app's takeover by a new developer, re-paying for and downloading it, and finding it an absolute mess in terms of accessibility is nothing but a huge blow to one's morale. And the story doesn't even end there...
GoodReader, reportedly the world’s top-selling PDF file management, viewing, and annotation app for iPhone and iPad, has recently released an update which adds VoiceOver compatibility.
Update: All of the promo codes have now been taken.