App Accessibility Please Read

Hi let me say first of all a big thank you to the apple team for making their devices accessible not just to us but to everyone. In responce to your conversation i know that many developers are trying to include v.o accessibility but most of them dont know about the exhistance of voice over, and sometimes people dont actually think about people with disabilities because its not something they come accross on a daily basis.

Reason is, you say it's there to embarrass them, and then you complain they don't care. If they don't care, and they have a bunch of sighted users using their app, again, they're not gonna care and there's nothing you can do about it. What about angry birds that has a bad accessibility rating for a reason. Counter productive, and then in my opinion, what's the point of Applevis ratings and advocating?

Hi Jeremy, Out of interest, how would you envision this working? I don't think it's quite as straight forward as AppleVis, which is the perfect environment for such a rating. To be fair on developers, Apple would probably have to consider accessibility as part of the App Store submission process if they were to introduce what you're asking for.

You may be well-intentioned, but this is never going to happen, so you might as well save your time and energy for something more productive. I would be more than happy to be proved wrong, and if I am I will be joining the queue of people applying for a job with Apple, as I suspect that they would need to employ every AppleVis user (and probably a whole load more) if they wanted to test and grade the nearly 1 million apps that are in the App Store. And, presumably, this will need to be part of the approval process for every app update. Oh boy, to think that developers moan now at how long this takes! And, hang on, aren't there plenty of times when we can't even agree amongst ourselves on whether an app is accessible or not? Oh boy.

Hi I agree with you! How ever should you think that on App Store there over 750,apps apps on the current iOS 6. and at new iOS release will be arround 1,000,000 apps How many of then are you using? I seem thousand complain without any reason on this forum as on blindSquare, FaceBook, etc. etc. Sound like meeds to be software developing by yourself to costumize own apps.

A rating system like you propose would be very useful and I would be willing to give ratings for such a system.

We've been discussing this for years and have found it not a viable option. Each person finds stuff accessible in different ways so what might be accessible to you might not be accessible to me and vice versa. I do agree this should be done but again not a viable solution. Take care. and not all apps are ment to be accessible. For example an app for planing a house or engineering as no one in the blind world does these things. Well we do but the apps have graphs and stuff. I know an ingineer personally tha'ts how I know these things.

Face it, we're a minority. Apple cares enough to make their products usable by blind people for sure, which is great, but not all apps are created by them, and that's as it should be. In a perfect world every single app would be accessible to everyone blind or sighted. But unfortunately it's not. Another thing...the only people who use the words "accessible" and "accessibility" are blind and visually impaired. Talk to any app developer and you just say it's not accessible. They'll look at you funny and not have an idea of what you're talking about. If you point them to apple's guidelines then it becomes more clear, and even then, they might not be able to follow them to the letter. This is why we need to stick with Applevis as it is.

I definitely support your idea. However, for the reasons pointed out by several people in the comments, the 1 to 5 star rating system wouldn't work. In short, this is because, as mentioned, opinions differ as to whether something is accessible or not; the rating would need to be reconsidered for every update; and Apple would need accessibility experts to review every app before acceptance and they probably don't have the human resources to do this. Instead of a 1 to 5 star rating system, I think a similar result could be achieved by having developers answer a few questions about how they wrote the app, and to post these answers on the App Store page. These questions could include things like: • Does the app include VoiceOver support? • Was the app created using only Apple's built-in UI elements? • Does the app include any custom made UI elements? • Does the app include mostly or all custom made UI elements? Such questions would not necessarily tell us whether the app is accessible with VoiceOver, but would give some indication. It would be of some help when deciding whether or not to purchase an app which has not yet been reviewed on AppleVis. Whether or not Apple would ever consider such a thing is a different question. At least I think they would be more likely to take this approach rather than a 1 to 5 star rating which Apple itself had to provide. I'm guessing that Apple similarly wouldn't bother with a user provided 1 to 5 star accessibility rating as they would probably argue uses can just use the existing rating system for this.

I've already said this elsewhere, but I think that it is worth repeating here - from our experience here at AppleVis, I would have to say that developers are often the worst possible people to tell you about the accessibility of their apps.

On a daily basis we have developers trying to post their apps to the site or emailing us direct, and the number of these who show that they have no idea of what VoiceOver is and why it matters to the users of this site is extremely disappointing. When they use the form to try and post the app directly to the site's App Directory, we will regularly see comments that show all too clearly that they don't know what VoiceOver is and also have no concept of what accessibility means in the context that we use it. Their comments are often littered with contradictions - about labelling, element reading and the overall usability. Suffice to say, there is no way that you can rely on what they say. Which, of course, is why we do not allow developers to submit their own apps to this site's App Directories! The thought of the App Store being filled with this level of misinformation is not an attractive one. And, raising awareness to the level that would be necessary to avoid this would be a major endeavour and would probably still leave lots of developers who simply wouldn't have the time or inclination to take much notice of whatever information was being provided to them about VoiceOver support and accessibility. In this situation, you would have to ask whether no information is better than misinformation. I also cannot see how human testing of apps is realistically possible. There are simply too many. Even if you didn't try to catalogue what is already in the App Store, and instead tested each new app or update that was submitted after the introduction of any system, I would guess that this is several thousand apps every day. To do this, you would need an absolute army of testers, all operating within strict guidelines to ensure that there was consistency within the testing and reporting. The financial costs and the potential time implications for the app approval system are almost certainly going to make this unviable. The only viable option that I can see, is one that automates the process. I have doubts that this is technically possible, but the knowledge necessary to back up that view is way beyond my pay grade (smile)