We are pleased to announce that voting for the 2018 inductees into the AppleVis iOS App Hall of Fame is now open.
Now in its seventh year, the AppleVis iOS App Hall of Fame is one of the ways in which the AppleVis community seeks to recognize developers of accessible iOS applications. Apps in the Hall of Fame can be liberating; empowering; life-changing; provide access to information that sighted users take for granted; or, in some cases, they can just be good fun!
To be eligible for induction into the AppleVis iOS App Hall of Fame, an app must:
- Be fully accessible to blind and low vision users;
- Be from a developer with a demonstrated and long-term commitment to full accessibility of their app(s);
- Have been available in the App Store for a significant period of time; and
- Demonstrate excellence in design, functionality and operation.
In short, the iOS App Hall of Fame represents the best of the best in accessible iOS applications, as decided by the AppleVis community.
Nominees
Below are the nominees for the 2018 induction into the AppleVis iOS App Hall of Fame. The two nominees with the most votes will be inducted.
Blackbox :: infamous puzzles
Every year at its Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC), Apple celebrates and acknowledges through its Apple Design Awards the mobile and desktop apps which raise the bar in design, technology and innovation. Blackbox was a 2017 winner of this prestigious award; cited by Apple as recognition of the app being "fully accessible, and offering unique and ingenious gameplay, deep iOS integration, and clever innovations."
According to Apple’s own report on the 2017 Design Awards, Blackbox is:
... a refreshingly stimulating, engrossing, and clever puzzle game that breaks through the “fourth wall” of iPhone to take you beyond the screen and make your world a part of each solution. Designed and developed by one person, Blackbox was chosen as an Apple Design Award winner for being fully accessible, and offering unique and ingenious gameplay, deep iOS integration, and clever innovations. Blackbox offers puzzles that rely on minimalistic clues, deliberate movement, elegant animations, and visual cues to expand creative thinking and encourage players to solve puzzles by turning, shouting, clicking, snapping, and more. It is fully accessible, taking a highly visual interface designed to be navigated by touch and and other sensory inputs, and adding a brilliant sonic interface that enables a new world of gameplay for everyone. It uses haptics for sensory feedback to make puzzles more personal, nuanced, and tactile, and relies heavily on the iPhone’s camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to enable sensory inputs. Additionally, by using CoreAudio, CoreLocation, Core Telephony, AVCaptureSession, iCloud, and Game Center in novel ways, this app takes advantage of an enormous range of iOS technologies. Blackbox challenges the player's ingenuity and creativity through innovative presentation and unique interactions. The result is a game that is impressively clever and unlike anything we’ve played before.
Ryan McLeod, the developer of Blackbox, has actively engaged with members of the AppleVis community in his efforts to enhance the gameplay and user experience for VoiceOver users.
Read more about Blackbox :: infamous puzzles
Crafting Kingdom
This immersive role playing game challenges you to complete quests and build your own empire. It's popularity in the AppleVis community is amply demonstrated by the AppleVis forum topic started by the game's developer, which at the time of writing is fast approaching the significant landmark of having received 1000 replies.
From the App Store:
Crafting Kingdom is a lovingly crafted (pun intended!) idle crafting game with a huge amount of goods to produce, complex production chains and plenty of quests for you to complete.
Build production sites, and start crafting resources. Harvest logs, coal, iron and many other goods. Then craft them into more valuable items and sell them on the market!
- Buy production sites
- Build complex production chains
- Complete quests and get powerful rewards
- Expand your storage facilities
- Build you very own estate
- Endless hours of fun. How much money can you make?
Read more about Crafting Kingdom
Dolphin EasyReader
Designed for readers with dyslexia, low vision or blindness, Dolphin EasyReader provides direct access to browse & read books and newspapers from more than 20 accessible libraries from across the world.
From the App Store:
EasyReader is a FREE accessible reading app for readers with dyslexia, low vision or blindness. Browse & download from the World's largest collection of talking book and newspaper libraries. Or copy text from anywhere on your phone & hear EasyReader read it back to you. Experience perfectly synchronized text & audio. Or for text only titles, EasyReader can add a human sounding voice of your choice. Boost comfort or contrast - choose colours, text size and highlights to suit your visual needs.
Make your books' text as big as your eyes require. Unlike other mainstream reading apps, there's no restriction with EasyReader. Zoom in with a standard 2 finger pinch or make fine adjustments with the simple sliders. There's never any blurry text or fuzzy fonts - your books' words are always crystal clear and always easy on the eye.
Navigate your books or newspapers by skipping directly to specific pages or headings. Search your book for words or phrases. Add text bookmarks or record your own audio bookmarks and return to them with ease.
EasyReader is fully optimized for use with iOS VoiceOver and iOS supported Braille displays.
Read more about Dolphin EasyReader
Envision AI
Developed after extensive research and discussion with vision impaired users into how artificial intelligence can be a helpful tool for processing and conveying visual information, Envision AI seeks to be much more than just an object recognition app.
The result is that Envision AI takes a context-based approach to providing useful and meaningful information, such as
- Recognise and read texts in their native dialect.
- Explain scenes that camera captures in detail.
- Train and recognise faces of your friends and family.
- Train and recognise your personal objects like wallet, keys or glasses.
- Do context-based recognition, that is, taking a picture of a clock will tell you the time, taking a picture of a window will tell you the weather outside, etc.
From the App Store:
Envision enables people with visual impairment to live more independently. With Envision, visually impaired users can shop in supermarkets, use public transport, read menu cards in restaurants, recognise their friends, find their belongings and so much more, all on their own.
Envision can process an image an extract the information user is looking for. It can read texts from any surface accurately and quickly. It also automatically detects the language of the text and reads it out in the correct dialect. This text can then be explored through VoiceOver and also exported out.
Envision also does a great job of describing scenes. You can teach Envision to recognise faces of your friends and family and find out what they are doing by taking a picture of them. This also works for personal objects that the app also allows taught to the app.
The scene description and text recognition also work on all photos on your phone, right from the camera roll to WhatsApp images. This makes the web and social media a lot more accessible.
Land of Livia
Land of Livia takes the core elements of traditional role playing and adventure games to create an immersive world for you to explore whenever you have some spare time or the desire to escape from the real world.
From the App Store:
Land of Livia is a different kind of experience that is designed for relaxed gameplay to fit in around your busy day. You only need to touch base periodically to gather rewards or continue on.
FEATURES
- Free prelude chapter 'The Sorceress and the Sea' - explore the Land of Livia and discover the nature of the evil that has caused its current drought!
- Chapter 1 'A Land Divided' and Chapter 2 'The First Tribe' provide even more content and are available via in app purchase
- Travel to varied Towns and Dungeons and collect powerful Items, precious Gems, Real Estate, and Companions
- Unlock Legends by listening to rumors and piece together lore items in order to find and equip Legendary Items
- Chat with your friends at the Campfire and compete for #1 on the Leaderboards
- Level up your Hero in order to complete increasingly difficult quests
- Discover rune combinations with limited guesses in the Lore Researching mini game
- Test your reflexes and precision in the Gem Cutting mini game
- Entire game is fully accessible with VoiceOver
Seeing AI
Beginning life as a research project to explore ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to enhance the lives of the vision impaired, Seeing AI harnesses the power of AI to describe text, objects and people.
Since it's launch in July 2017, the tools offered by Seeing AI have evolved and expanded, enabling many blind and low vision users to replace a number of standalone apps with this single app capable of performing multiple tasks.
From the App Store:
Seeing AI is a free app that narrates the world around you. Designed for the blind and low vision community, this ongoing research project harnesses the power of AI to open up the visual world and describe nearby people, text and objects.
Optimized for use with VoiceOver, the app enables you to recognize:
- Short Text - Speaks text as soon as it appears in front of the camera.
- Documents - Provides audio guidance to capture a printed page, and recognizes the text, along with its original formatting.
- Products - Scans barcodes, using audio beeps to guide you; hear the name, and package information when available. (works with iPhone 6 and later)
- People - Saves people’s faces so you can recognize them, and get an estimate of their age, gender, and emotions.
- Scenes (early preview) - Hear an overall description of the scene captured.
- Currency - Recognizes currency notes. (Requires iOS 11)
- Color - Identifies color.
- Handwriting - Reads handwritten text like in greeting cards
- Light - Generates an audible tone corresponding to the brightness in the surroundings.
- Images in other apps - Just tap “Share” and “Recognize with Seeing AI” to describe images from Mail, Photos, Twitter, and more.
Weather Gods
This weather app for iOS takes a unique approach to presenting weather information, and VoiceOver accessibility is a major consideration of the app's design with its developer engaging proactively with blind users to seek feedback and suggestions on how to enhance the user experience..
From the App Store:
Meet the Gods: Fire, Ice, Water, Air & Moon delivering you the Weather as you have never experienced it before. Weather Gods redefines the weather app with painstakingly crafted data visualizations, procedural graphics and audio that enable you to literally see, hear and feel the weather. With no more weather icons to decode, the Weather Gods is simply the quickest, most engaging, most enjoyable way to get the accurate weather information you need.
The Weather Gods skillfully integrates premium weather data into an elegant, iOS Exclusive, easy-to-use interface that will delight casual users and weather enthusiasts alike.
With a wealth of rich weather data from the world’s most respected providers, the Weather Gods provide detailed site-based forecasts for over a million locations worldwide. Our advanced, next-generation notifications are easy to setup and bring you exactly the information you want right when you need it.
With 24 hour charts, observed weather, built in moon phase, widget, world clock and much, much more, the Weather Gods is a powerful personal time machine that lets you travel the world and visit the future. Please come join us on this exciting journey as we begin our mission to bring you the finest, most practical, most enjoyable weather app experience ever. We can’t wait to hear what you think!
Voting
Simply use the form below to cast your vote now.
Please note that you need to be registered and logged in to vote. So, if you don't see the voting form, please login and return to this page.
Voting closes at 23:59 PST on Friday, May 18, 2018.
If there is a particular iOS app that you would like to see considered for the next round of inductions, please take a moment to nominate it here.