Hi all, I have been hoping for 2 changes to iOS for a few ears now but they haven’t popped up by themselves so I thought I’d see if anyone else thought they would be a good idea to approach Apple about. 1. Increased target size. By this I mean when I move my finger around the iPhones screen I obviously hear the echo of what is under my finger however some screens for example within a folder don’t have much content on the screen so there is large areas of empty space which VO announces with a lower pitch tone. If the target area for each icon was larger and there was less empty space it would be far less frustrating to find what you are looking for. Empty space doesn’t tell me anything useful but there is a 3 x 3 grid of icons I do want to interact with. Telling me I am not on an icon isn’t as useful as being a little more forgiving about how close to the icon I am. This would of course apply to other areas of the UI in the same way but within folders was the most obvious way to demonstrate what I mean.
2. Latency, by which I mean the length of time between touching the screen and VO starting to announce what is under my finger. I know its only around 0.2 seconds or so on my iPhone X however halving that to 0.1 or less would make an enormous difference in how quickly I could move through the UI. Some people refuse to move away from Elaquance on JAWS for this precise reason. Low latency is so important to moving around quickly they are willing to forgo the fantastic newer voices which are far more dynamic and rich. I currently use Karen as she is the quickest I have found with plenty of dynamic range. I think Alex may be slightly quicker but male voices don’t have the pitch range of female voices. The iPhone x and Xs both have 120Hz input digitisers so a latency of 0.05 seconds or less should be easily achievable given the power of the recent A series processors. I could even imagine a slider in VO settings allowing one to trade battery life for responsiveness and low latency, I’d definitely take a 5% battery hit to half the latency of VO.
What does everyone think?
Do I have any support or am I the only one wanting these improvements.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Comments
Latency Issue?
I think I've had the latency issue somewhat on my Mac, but not to the extent that it prevents me from doing stuff in a timely fashion. If I'm understanding you correctly, this is only with the voices? What I have experienced though since I got my iPhone earlier this year, is log-in screens timing out on me. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I've yet to find a way around this and it is kinda annoying. I have rather small hands and a bit of trouble with motor coordination. This has particularly been problematic for me when logging in to download apps. I realize I could use Siri for this purpose, but I don't really feel comfortable speaking my passwords. But I am getting a bit better at this it seems.
Hi Ekhaj.
Apologies, I should have been more specific. I am talking about iOS on iPhones iPods and iPads. When I say latency, I don’t mean its a problem, like i’m waiting for the TTS engine to speak. I just mean reducing the latency between hitting an on screen element and having that element read aloud would make an enormous difference to how quickly you could navigate the OS.
I’m afraid I am unable to help with your latency issues or log on timing out as since this spring I am 100% iOS (unfortunately that excludes my windows 10 work laptop) but personal devices I’m getting by just fine with iOS devices which is pretty amazing really when you think back to the iphone 3GS.
Another improvement.
Another thing I’d very much like to see is VO in iOS evolving to become more like VO on MAC OS. More keyboard interaction would be great as well as containers you interact with, say a line of social media icons could be a single item like on Mac OS which you then 2 finger swipe into and back out of. Anyone interested at all?