Hello,
Is the LookTel VoiceOver tutorial app no longer available? I was looking for it the other day to put on someone's phone and couldn't find it on the app store. I still had it on my device from a long time ago, but am not sure what's going on.
Any information would be appreciated.
Comments
You would be correct.
The Voiceover Tutorial has been gone for a while, and it really is quite a shame given the neat ideas they had for it. There was a basketball game in which you practiced the swipe up and down gestures, a safe game in which you practiced the rotor rotations, and even a maze game where swiping in all directions was the focus. The last time it was updated before being finally removed was back in the iOS7 days.
Seeing how the tutorial is gone, the best I can suggest for learning Voiceover is the practice mode. That can be found either by tapping the button in the Voiceover settings or tapping 4 fingers on the screen twice to get to it from anywhere at all.
Thanks
The rotor safe game was the biggest reason I found it helpful, and Ballyland rotor is to immature for adults to use.
It's coming back
I am giving a presentation to iOS and macOS developers about VoiceOver in three weeks and planned to recommend the LookTel VoiceOver tutorial to them.
I contacted LookTel to enquire about the app a couple of days ago, and they told me that the app and their other apps will be coming back to the App Store in the next couple of weeks.
(I would love people's input for that presentation, with any examples of 'near misses' or pet peeves where app developers haven't got VoiceOver quite right. AppleVis forum post for input here.)
That's Awesome!
I kind of assumed they had folded or something. My next step would have been to contact Apple to encourage them to create something if this amp really was no longer in existence. I may still do this anyway, as a tutorial is one of the few areas where I give Google and Samsung's screen readers props.
Wonder Why They Removed It?
Subject line pretty much sums it up. If it's supposedly coming back, I'm wondering why they removed it? That was what I used upon a trainer's recommendation when I first got my iPhone, and it was good. For some reason the basketball game always quit on me right in the middle, and I couldn't get the other games to work. Perhaps they're releasing a major update or something. I never thought to ask my tutor at Second Sense whether he meant this app or another one, because I guess I thought there was only one 3rd-party practice app out there. But the native VO practice on the iPhone is very good too. Also Talking Typer from the American Printing House for the Blind seems pretty good. I just purchased that one and have only played around with it briefly.
Well it seems not
What I reported above was what I was told in August 2019. Obviously, given the LookTel VoiceOver Tutorial *hasn't* come back, clearly their plans did not work out as expected. I'm going to contact them again, and encourage them to open-source the app given they do not appear to be updating it.