TED

Description of App

Feed your curiosity and expand your world with TED Talks. Explore more than 2,000 free videos and learn from the world's most remarkable people. Search by any mood or topic, from tech and science to the surprises of your own psychology. Features on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch: ・Browse the free TED Talks video library, with subtitles in over 100 languages ・Play videos on your device or send to your home entertainment system via AirPlay or Chromecast ・Discover inspiring, funny, or jaw-dropping free talks ・Let us build you a custom playlist -- tailored to your time frame ・Bookmark talks to watch later ・Download talks to watch offline ・Listen to an on-demand playlist of TED Talks audio

Version

3.2.1

Free or Paid

Free

Apple Watch Support

Device(s) App Was Tested On

iPhone

iOS Version

11.0.2

Accessibility Comments

Voice Over reads all of the buttons which enable you to play, share, and save your favorite lectures. The interface is easy to navigate. There is one area of the application which may pose a bit of an annoyance. I'm new to the IPhone so I don't know if this is an issue with VoiceOver or one that stems from my novice skill level with the IPhone and Voice Over. There is a feature called Inspire Me which creates a random playlist based on the category of the lectures you would like to view (funny, beautiful, informative, etc). You are also instructed to select how much time you have (anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes). I had to disable Voice Over and swipe in the middle of the screen, re-enable it, then hear how many minutes I had set it for. Again, I'm unsure if this is because I'm inexperienced with using VoiceOver or if this is a problem with the application and the way it was developed. This will need to be looked into and the rating updated if necessary.

VoiceOver Performance

VoiceOver reads all page elements.

Button Labeling

All buttons are clearly labeled.

Usability

The app is fully accessible with VoiceOver and is easy to navigate and use.

Other Comments

Ted offers many video lectures on a wide array of topics, ranging from politics to scientific breakthroughs to uplifting inspirational fodder for the soul. For those who enjoy learning new things, this is a great app because the videos are updated weekly. You'll never run out of things to explore and best of all, it's free! Another noteworthy feature is Ted Radio, which provides a constant supply of randomly selected lectures as streaming audio. You never know what you'll be presented with, but it sure will be interesting!

App Store Link

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ted/id376183339?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Developer's Website

http://www.ted.com/pages/about

Developer's Twitter Username

@TEDTalks

Recommendations

5 people have recommended this app

Most recently recommended by AnonyMouse 8 years 1 month ago

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Comments

How can I

Thank you for adding this App. I've known about Ted for quite a while, but never wanted to bother with yet another video site, accessing Ted content through this app is so much better. I've read that you can set it to play videos as audio only, how do I do this? Also I thought I'd be able to download content for later offline watching/listening, how do I do this? Thanks.

If it won't stream...

I keep trying to use this (love the idea), but it won't stream nicely on my iPhone 4. I had better success going right to their website and playing the quicktime movies from there: the website is quite accessible, too: www.ted.com. don't they have a podcast?

Version 2.4.6

What's New in Version 2.4.6

New in TED 2.4.6

* We've made it easier to share TED talks using your installed apps and share extensions on iOS 8.

Version 3.2.1

What's New in Version 3.2.1

Hello again, TEDsters!

We have something exciting for you all coming very, very soon. But first, we need to do a little housecleaning to get things in order.

* We added 15-second rewind and fast-forward controls to video playback. We don't want you to miss that key point in our next favorite TED talk.
* We show a bit more context when you stream your talks to your Apple TV using AirPlay.
* We now defer to your system settings for showing subtitles. We hope this makes them easier to read for folks that like their text a little bigger than our designers do.
* We made great strides in VoiceOver support in the TED video player. If you're a VoiceOver user, we'd love to hear from you about how we can make it even better in the future. Let us know!
* Our universal link support works again on your iPhone. Have you seen the new TED.com? It looks great.
* We now do a better job at enabling English subtitles on talks that are not natively in English.
* We fixed a few issues where video downloads would never resume after the app was removed from the multitasking switcher.
* We fixed an issue where you couldn't rotate the video player when playing your 'Surprise Me' playlist. That was indeed surprising.
* We added Control Center support for video playback. It's just like our support for audio that we added recently, except for moving pictures!
* Most people say "bug fixes and performance improvements" in their release notes. We just make that a bullet item at the end of our list. We did indeed fix a lot of little crashes and tried to clean up some memory usage throughout the app.

We'd love to hear from you. If you run into any issues or have general feedback on our app, email us at contact@ted.com.

ps. We don't prompt you for a review in the app because we don't want to take away from your time with our speakers. However, if you are enjoying TED for iOS, please take a moment to rate and review us on the App Store. It really helps us out!

Subtitles now are read in iOS 11

There is no way, that I can feel any happier, I have always wanted to listen to subtitled media, but Ted is definitely the 500 percent joy so far. Any other ideas for subtitled movies?

Problem with subtitles

If you're using a braille display to read subtitles and the subtitle extends for more than one display length and you pan forward to see the rest of it, the next subtitle almost always does not appear. I would think that this is an iOS bug rather than a TED issue. Have others run into this problem?

Misleading review

In 2019 bugs were introduced to the TED app that make it very hard to use. The problem was reported to TED support at the time and was responded to with something to the effect of, “We will consider Voice Over (VO) access as a future enhancement.” While the TED app is updated regularly, the bugs have yet to be resolved.” The biggest problem is the lack of button labelling. It is common to encounter screens that are a mix of labeled and unlabeled buttons.

I can only conclude that either TED does not test the app before updates are released or people who use VO are simply not enough of a priority to justify the problems encountered during pre-release testing.