Over the past day there has been much coverage online of a Mashable article featuring Jordyn Castor, a blind member of Appleās Accessibility Team.
In the article, Castor speaks passionately about Appleās deep commitment to accessibility and her own personal journey.
The Braille Institute of America has launched a new iOS app that aims to make it easier for the vision-impaired to find useful apps.
Visually Impaired Apps (ViA) claims to fill the need for "a one-stop shop of useful apps that help visually impaired people stay connected and engaged with the world".
At the end of each month the AppleVis Editorial Team take a look at all 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 we think is the most noteworthy.
Considering how much its release has been anticipated, it should come as no surprise that BrailleTouch is our choice for January.
It's been reported that Sendero is in the early stages of developing a full-featured GPS application for the iPhone.
Most of you are probably aware of the Sendero Group, and many of you will have used their location-based information and navigation systems for the blind. Considering how highly-regarded these GPS systems are, and the company's near 20 years of experience, it is easy to be excited by news of an iOS application. However, it also raises some questions.
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 āSafari not respondingā bug that causes repeated temporary freezes for many when using VoiceOver on a Mac.
We are pleased to announce that Dave Nason and Tyler Stephen have joined the AppleVis Editorial Team.
Dave and Tyler are both long-term contributors to the AppleVis community, and they bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table.
A new feature for VoiceOver users called "Accessibility Events" was introduced in iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4 without any announcement or documentation. I cannot find any info about this feature on Apple's website. Even the installed Help files say nothing about it, so far. The only information given is a short description label in the Mac Preferences and IOS settings, shown below. To the best of my knowledge, which is quite limited at this time, leaving it turned on allows webmasters and anyone else who cares to know to discover if you have VoiceOver running.
Interpreting peoplesā body languageāparticularly facial expressionsāis one of those challenges that almost all blind people face. But soon, there will be an app for that.
Apple has just concluded its annual September media event. This year's, which it titled "By Innovation Only", gave us new iPhones, the Series 5 Apple Watch, and more details on the company's new Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus subscription services. Innovation, though, wasn't exactly the word I first thought of when I considered how to sum up the announcements. Don't get me wrong: the new iPhones have some great new features, and it will be interesting to see where the new subscription services go.
With the public release of iOS 8 now just two days away, we wanted to let you all know that we have lots of information and resources ready to share with you as soon as Apple makes its new version of iOS available for download.
This will include a number of Blog posts and Guides with information on what you will find in iOS 8, along with podcast demonstrations of some new and changed features.
Update 19 May, 2016: Facebook has today announced that automatic alt text is now available globally in English.
*** Facebook has today officially launched itās much anticipated tool for automatically generating descriptions of photos posted to its site.
The latest update to Yosemite, 10.10.2, is now live. It claims to fix wifi bugs and other assorted problems, including VoiceOver. With the exception of the two bugs encountered when typing in edit fields on webpages and the inability to play audio iMessages, I have to say that I've found nothing new or fixed in terms of VoiceOver, as much as I hate to write that. See the list of bugs at the bottom of this post. There is a note next to some of them, indicating if it is fixed or could not be tested/reproduced.
An incredible bit of news just hit the wire today--so huge that we wanted to let you know about it ASAP.
The incredible folks that created the biggest innovation to come to touch-typing for the visually impaired community--Fleksy - Happy Typing--released a statement today announcing that the app is now FREE.
An interesting and surprising piece of news today is that Fleksy has been acquired by Pinterest. Whatās perhaps most interesting for the vision impaired, is that this may have positive consequences for those of us who remember just how revolutionary Fleksy once promised to be.
A few months ago, the community of blind and visually impaired iOS users was thrown into an uproar when Fleksy split their apps into a new, updated version that was not Voiceover friendly, and an older version that was. Hundreds of comments, tweets, emails, and boos were posted, with some saying Fleksy was abandoning the blind community that helped it get off the ground by purchasing its original app, and others urging patience as Fleksy went through a transition and promised to reunite the two apps into one within six months.