Black Ink crosswords

I was having a conversation over the weekend about how I wished there were accessible crossword puzzles. And, look what we have here? I will be trying this out sooner rather than later!

A couple questions if I could.

1. I was sampling a puzzle and I wanted to enter FAA as an answer. I do so and move on to the next clue. I'm moving along thinking this is awesome, and I want to check my answers. I look at the answer for FAA and to my disappointment, I find that my answer was not entered correctly. Instead of FAA, I find blank FA. This leads to Question 2.

2. How does one correct a mistake? Also, how does one know he's putting the correct letter in the correct square of the clue? Look at my above example. I want to put the f in the first square of 6 Down, not the second as the game presumed.

This is a promising app since Apple broke its puzzle solving access since iOS 17.1 and has not fixed it yet. Too many other priorities with the Vision Pro I guess.

I did that but it doesn't reliably tell me which spot a character will appear in. For now, I can wait for VoiceOver to read the blanks and where the character is. One would think though the character would appear at the beginniing of the clue instead of the middle of the clue.

Are you getting the same thing on all puzzles? Did it work this way during beta testing? What were your results when working with solving puzzles? Did something change with iOS 17.3?

There's no documentation with this game, which seems unfortunate. It's easy to figure out, but as previously stated, the cursor doesn't always go where you'd expect it to go, and there's no visible edit box to use to go to the letter you want to remove. Doing a double-tap and hold brings up an edit box where you can manually enter in an answer, but it doesn't remove any previously entered letters. I'm curious to know if the person who originally submitted this is using a Bluetooth keyboard or the on-screen keyboard since you say to use backspace to delete a letter, but on the on-screen keyboard there is no backspace, only the delete, and that doesn't delete things all that accurately. I've logged into my New York Times account and linked it so that I can play those crosswords, and I've also paid for a year for this app, and I'm not saying that as a complaint, but to say that it's just weird that there's no help documentation. If this was previously tested with VoiceOver and a Bluetooth keyboard only, it would be helpful to state this in the comments. I don't regret paying because I'm sure it can be fixed, but I'm wondering how this got missed since it seems to be affecting at least two of us so far. Also, while writing this, I had an idea to tap on the Tools button in case there's a clear word option in there. Sadly, there are options for checking the word or letters, but not to clear them. This is an incredible start to what I think is going to be absolutely amazing for someone like me who's been looking for an accessible way to do crosswords for the last six months or so, but at this precise moment it does seem to have a slight accessibility problem.

Hi - I'm the developer of Black Ink. I just learned about this thread thanks to a follow up by email from @wiljames. As I said in my reply to him, I value making my apps accessible to greatest extent possible. I know I have some bugs in the accessibility of Black Ink for iOS and I want to fix them as soon as I can. I'll add the comments here to my list of TODO items for future updates. Hopefully they'll get fixed ASAP, and I can continue to refine the behavior of the app based on your feedback here.

Daniel

This is a response to @cat_lover mainly but also anybody else who is frustrated by the lack of documentation. Just to put everything into perspective, I'm a 1-person company and I develop this app along with several other apps for the Mac. So, maybe I've spread myself too thin, but it's hard for me to make everything "perfect" with the stuff I do. I do try to document things when I can, but it's true I haven't made an effort yet to do that with the iOS version of Black Ink. It'll be something I strive to improve upon for the future. Thanks!

Daniel

I hope that folks who are still interested in accessible crosswords will give the updated 2.0.3 version a try! It's in the App Store now, and improves some of the glaring issues reported here. Please let me know how I can continue to improve things. I have some ideas of my own but you all would know best. Also @wiljames I don't know if you've gotten my emails - I am responding though!

Daniel

I'm glad that it seems to be mostly working well. As for the problem with deleting letters, I wonder if this is a situation where the visual UI is not getting mapped to VO correctly, or maybe the method you use to delete is different than what I usually do.

One key thing to keep in mind is that whenever you press the delete key, the selected square's contents are deleted, and the focus switches to the previous square. This is analogous to how every time you type a character in a square, the focus changes to the next unsolved square (by default, there is a setting for this).

So the problem with deleting the contents might be that it's not easy enough via VO to get to the last square in the word. One way you could do it is to focus on the word following the word you want to clear, and then press the delete key. If the press the delete key in the first square of a word, and that square is already blank, it jumps focus back to the end of the previous word.

It sounds like I probably need to add some better accommodations for navigating to a specific square and hearing what's there.

I'm curious to know though if my explanation of how things are supposed to work changes your interpretation of what's happening when you try to delete.

One other thing, an alternative to deleting backward by pressing the delete key, is to delete forward by pressing the space key. It will replace current square with blank and move to the next square. It will not, however, jump to the next word after pressing space on the last square in the word.

Let me know if this helps at all. If you could get a screenshot of the board when it's in the state (or maybe even a screen recording), and email it to me at support@redsweater.com that might give me some clues, too.

Daniel

Thanks to a video sent by KE8UPE, I think I have an idea of where the attempt to delete and re-enter is getting stymied. In the video, they showed a situation where for example a three square word is filled with the letters "XXX". To try to replace it with "XXL" they first pressed space three times to delete each of the X entries. Then they attempted to retype the "XXL", but the problem here is that when you "space" to delete to the end of a word, when you're done the "focus" is on the end of the word. At this point to get back to the beginning of the word you have backspace, or else switch to another word and then back again.

I think that in general a sighted user would tap directly on the 3rd "X" in this case, and then re-type the "L" to correct the mistake.

So I need to figure out how to make this is as easy to navigate for VoiceOver users. It seems like having more frequent feedback about where you are are in the word, or the ability to re-announce that, would help? I also wonder if a custom rotor for "squares" that would let you flick left/right/up/down to navigate the puzzle would be helpful? Anybody using the app with an external keyboard can currently do this with the arrow keys on the keyboard.

Daniel

Basically the way Apple runs the market for the App Store these days, they strong encourage people to do subscription pricing. It has benefits for developers since it means we can keep working to improve the app but know we will also continue to get paid for doing our jobs. The way Apple sets it up, it's hard to do the traditional "upgrade pricing". Yes, it's possible, but tedious and I wanted to try out subscription pricing for a change.

The "Lifetime" option is there for people who absolutely can't stand subscription pricing so that they have an option available. I intentionally priced it at about the cost of 5 years subscribing to the app, because in exchange for the (potentially very good deal) of a "lifetime" subscription, I need to be sure I'm getting compensated fairly.

The thing about software, it's not like most things you buy in the real world. You buy a broom, and it works as a broom, and eventually it wears out, and you buy another one. You buy an app, it hopefully continues to get better, never wears out. That's in a nutshell why developers like myself need to have some way of continuing to be compensated for long-maintained software.

Daniel

I'm totally willing to accept the more knowledgeable folks who say this game is excellent, but I wasn't even able to enter an answer, let alone check one. I'm used to the way the game Four Down operates, where you double tap on the clue and enter each letter in the blanks. Can anyone give me a bit of baby-step help please?

Hi Daniel,

I submitted feedback to you on my findings through Test Flight. I included a screen shot.

I do like the custom rotor options for up, down, left, and right.

If you’re wanting to see what we are dealing with, I would recommend turning on VoiceOver. It will change your phone gestures, so beware of that. One tap is two taps quickly. VoiceOver also provides hints on how to interact with the element that has focus.

I hope this helps!

I was looking for something like this, but I have a hard time even with the sampler.
I saw vertical navigation is an option, but it doesn't seem to work.
I feel bad for the dev but I honostly don't know how others are able to use this.
It feels like it's not reading the selected square properly and the only way I was able to make a correction is by spacing the whole word then keep trying to type until the first letter appears in the first square.
Otherwise, I start typing in the middle and the word wraps around.
Example, start typing "down" when not aligned properly and I get "wndo."