iExit Interstate Exit Guide

I took iExit for much more than a test drive when we drove from California to Indiana. We are now returning and have made it to St. Louis as I write this review.

First, the program is accessible and I'm using the latest version as of August 2015. It shows your direction of travel and a list of upcoming exits in distance order. So you can learn you are on i70, traveling west, and that you are a mile from 160 and that exit 45 is 18 miles away. (In most states this wouldn't be true, but the exit numbers are all confusing in Illinois due to several freeway interchanges.)

That takes just a few flicks to uncover, so it's quick if someone needs to know what exits are coming up.

But if what you want is gas, or a restaurant, it's more complicated. You have to go through several screens to search, and there is no built-in search for what we like, which are travel plazas like Pilot, Flying J, Petro, Road Ranger, Loves, or Travel America. These "truck stops" have gas, food and bathroom plus a pet relief area all in one convenient stop.

So to find one, I must tap on an exit, and another sscreen appears where I can flick through what's available. I really would like a category for travel plazas that would quickly show me all of them coming up in the direction I'm headed.

I believe the program probably has icons to show you what's at each exit, but to read actual text, beside the exit number and the city name, you must open the screen for that exit. Cellular internet isn't reliably fast on the interstate, so this can take a while.

My husband would ask where the next truck stop was and I'd wait, and wait and wait for the next exit screen to open; by the time it did, we'd passed that exit.

My compromise was to keep spreadsheets on my netbook for all the locations of all the truck stops, downloaded from their websites so I could view the spreadsheets offline, and sort them by state and interstate number. So I'd look at all the truck stops in Kansason i70 , offline on my netbook, then go back to the phone to check which exits were coming up.

This app would be much more useful if you could download a hundred miles or so of the upcoming interstate offline and you could go to a single screen for searching, simply type in "pilot" and have it immediately show you all thePilot Travel centers on your downloaded route. When I select Search, instead of getting a text field, I get categories, like gas or food.

A few more thoughts, now that I'm back home and have crossed the Rockies and the Sierras with iExit twice.

The search is truly not accessible. You can type in a search string, but then a screen with unlabeled buttons appears. You can search for categories, like lodging or gas, but it's not possible with VO to locate a MacDonald's or a Motel 6 unless you want to scroll through all the lodging and food within a category.

If you travel a rout frequently and you already know what is at, say exit 250, it's very nice, because you always know where exit 250 is in relation to your current location, even if the internet is spotty. It does seem to keep 100 miles or so of the map offline, but only the exit list, and not the points of interest at each exit.

Crossing Wyoming and Nevada, in particular I had very little cellular access and it almost always knew where I was located. If you are off the highway, say when getting food or gas, it will report "not on highway" and show an accessible list of nearby places, stuff that's within a couple of miles. That stuff includes food, gas and lodging of course, but also parks, vet clinics and grocery stores.

You can always open the screen for any exit and see what's there, and that's quite accessible. But you do need a good connection to have that happen fast. So if you need a bathroom in 50 miles you are mostly fine. If you need it within the next five, forget using iExit to find it!

When you are at an interchange, it shows unlabeled buttons, but clicking on them shows other highways. There is also a left and a right button at the top to turn in those directions to explore other nearby highways at any time. Unfortunately the only way to know if you are now viewing a simulated location or a real location is to close and reopen the app, because once you go exploring, you are looking at other exits not actually near where you are. I'm guessing it is clear visually if you are in realtime or exploring the mmap, but I've found no way to know with VoiceOver. closing and opening the app again though always repositions you at your current location, with an accurate indication of your direction of travel. Unlike other exit guides, it knows you are headed West and only shows exits proceeding in that direction, making the display a lot less confusing.

IExit has coupons for nearly every stop but they are mostly inaccessible images. It would be a nice app for the family, if you had sighted people who could help with scanning the bar codes on all those discounts.

I did try other exit guides, but found nothing as accessible as iExit, even with its issues. In particular, many guides had a better search, but if you searched, say for Subway, you'd find every Subway within 100 miles, regardless if they were on your route or even your current highway. Many exit guies simply draw an imaginary circle around your current location, not taking in to account you are traveling on a specific highway in a specific direction, making the search, though accessible, not useful!