SmartThings App Accessibility

Good morning, I use the Samsung Smart Things iOS app in the UK to control the washing machine, it is reasonably accessible and you are able to select different wash cycles and temperatures however VoiceOver doesn't always announce when an item is selected. It's definitely useable though.

Well I don’t believe the smart things app is very good for controlling my Samsung washer. I would give it a C minus on that. You kind of have to guess on what to tap on because things that are buttons aren’t labeled as buttons at all in otherwise it just looks like a text field you just have to know the tap on a text field. I assume with a lot of patience and practice you could probably figured out how to control your washer with this app. However if all you want to do is verify the manual setting and monitor the progress this app works fine for that. Although the washing machine itself has a touchscreen it is fairly accessible. There is one large dial that beeps as you turn it and when you hit the starting it gives you a different beat so if you learn the order of the cycles you can just use the main knob to pick the cycle that you want. If you want to tweak everything that gets more difficult. Good luck.

Echoing what Tom has said here. I have had moderate success with customizing the Samsung washer and dryer I have. From what I can tell, the app was developed in React Native to work on Samsung phones and the full capability of Swift accessibility hasn't been taken advantage of.

What's worked for me:
• Setting up the device ON WI-FI.
• Starting/stopping the washer/dryer
• Inspecting the time remaining in a cycle.
• Selecting a preset "laundry recipe" (their words) for washing or drying.

We should definitely be bringing this to the attention of Samsung. My washer and dryer are supposedly ADA compliant according to the literature, but the app appears to be the weak link.

Hello
Two things
First
To the person that said we should let the people who created the app know about the accessibility issues I agree. However, the problem is when I looked into it that app is open source and really isn’t supported by the vendor.

Second,
I cannot say that the washing machine is the best but if you don’t need to tweak the cycles and are willing to use the preset cycles which are quite a few then I think you’re fine with this machine. The touchscreen is a little sensitive and you might want to put little rubber bumpers on spots but it isn’t necessary if you’re careful. I like to figure out where my fingers gonna go before I hit the power on and then I just hit the start button. The washer does a very good job and doesn’t use a lot of water. And if you augment it with the app but just to verify and monitor it works well.

Hello this is just a heads up, and, it is a serious issue. The current update of SmartThings breaks accessibility, and makes it unusable I am not sure if Samsung's aware of this issue, but it needs to be fixed urgently, as people rely on this service. As for iOS users, I don't believe there is a way to revert back to a previous update. Because, literally, all that they changed was they apparently added a routines tab to the tab bar, but apparently, they have done a lot more to break accessibility.

Hi, I hadn't used my Smartthings app for a while now, but got a new Samsung washing machine yesterday and tried the latest version of the app.

Is the bit that's broken for you, being able to select devices in the list?

Using voiceover I can browse most of the app without major issue, although it's quite clunky in places.
My main issue is that in the favourites list, or in the rooms list it's not allowing voiceover to see the devices in each list, hence there's no way of actually selecting and using things like my new washing machine.

If this is the same issue you are having, then it's obviously a major problem, as it makes the app pretty much useless.