Would this be helpful?

Hello. I'm new to AppleVis and am coming here to get feedback from this community about an app I may want to make. I don't have a lot of experience with the needs of visually impaired folks, but I think that I may have something that could help some people.

Up front: this tool would be targeted mostly at folks with reduced vision. Folks with no vision would probably find it not very useful, though I guess I could be wrong.

As a middle aged iPhone user, I find it frustrating when someone posts a screenshot of a bunch of text to a social network like Bluesky or X. In order to read the text, I either have to squint or I have to zoom in and scroll around the image. As I get older, the squinting gets less useful.

So I made a little share extension (that can be triggered from most apps that have images, including Bluesky) that reads images and finds any text in the images using Apple's Vision framework. It then displays that text in a scroll view below the image and lets you resize the font size as much as you'd like with a pair of buttons. It also will use speech synthesis to read the text of the image to you and will highlight the text it's currently reading in the image itself.

I've been using it for the last 2 days and finding it very useful.

Still, I don't know much about the landscape of assistive software for folks with low vision. I don't know if I'm reinventing the wheel or if I'm doing something that is just not needed, or even wrong.

As of right now, I have something that works ok for about 80% of situations, but only with certain apps (the only social apps it seems to work with are Bluesky and Slack so far) and with some annoying bugs like finding paragraph breaks where there should be none.

To get it to the point of being a useful product could take quite a bit more than 2 days' work. It's something that maybe I'd be interested in doing, but only if there are people out there who would actually find it useful.

I've posted a screen movie of the app as it works right now in a post at
https://bsky.app/profile/jaywardell.bsky.social/post/3lftlrycslc25

I'd appreciate any feedback on it. If I hear enough positive feedback, I may begin a TestFlight group and see where it goes. If I hear only negative feedback, then I'll go back to my other projects and just use it myself.

If someone has an idea for a way to do what I'm doing that's already out there, I'd be interested in that too. I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Thanks in advance for any feedback you may have.