Making video calling accessible

It's be nice for me too! I have a lot of sighted family/friends too.And I video chat with them through mainly FaceTime and Messenger. For me, I usually rely on them to help me. I'll usually ask them if they can see me or whatever I'm holding up in front of the camera. And they direct me.

While I agree, to my knowledge, no such app exists. But FaceTime tells you which camera you're using. Like it'll say, `your video front facing`. I'd recommend until 1 app is made or found, that you rely on your sighted friends and family.

You are welcome. Usually if you just ask, thy may surprise you by their graciousness and willingness to help.

Yeah, I think Facetime is your best bet for now. I've used Facetime a little bit and it seems to work great.

I'm surprised that FaceTime doesn't do this. I would have thought if the camra app did that FaceTime would.

I think for the most part our best bet is to just ask the person we are talking to. I do this from time to time, and it seems to work ok; I don't think sighted people themselves would even always be perfectly centered in the view finder any way.

However, I think some alternative method could be interesting, and even necessary at times. For example, my wife, who is also blind, has had to use Skype before to do job interviews. That's not exactly the best time to have to ask the person your talking to if your in frame, especially since even bringing up the whole blind thing with potential employers should be done with tact and thoughtfulness. What my wife has done is to call a sighted friend or family member before the interview, and get their help to place her computer just right so that she will be in frame in her seat during the call.

Of course, this is an annoying process that takes time, help from a sighted friend, and works better with a computer then with a phone. If your using a phone perhaps you could prop it up with something, or buy a case with a kick stand. If you were able to do that you could try to set up the framing with be my eyes, or BeSpecular, before your call. You could even just use the built in camera app, which will tell you if your face is centered in the shot.

When it comes to ios I think some method like those mentioned above is going to be your best shot, because if you were using a third party video chat app the sighted person you were talking to would probably also have to use that app, unless one of the major video call providers, such as Skype or face book allows third party apps to call into their services.

I do think some option where your phone lightly vibrates or something when your face leaves the view finder during video calls would be interesting.

Subject line pretty much says it all, and no I'm not talking about Apple's on-board screen magnifier. But I recently read about a 3rd-party app called Zoom, which has video-calling capabilities. Now that I think about it, I'm surprised I haven't read or heard about some sort of legal action on the part of Apple for the naming of this other app. I'm wondering if that'll happen or not. But I digress. I installed this 3rd-party app on my computer, and attempted to use it last night to call into a talk show on Mushroom FM. It didn't end up working, probably because of some setting. But I'm wondering if the app would be of any help here. Their website is http://www.zoom.us .