I'm in the market for a new machine to use at home. Life Fitness seems to have all the tech I could want, with no accessibility!
Peleton Bike+ seems fully accessible, with TalkBack available, but I'd really like an Elliptical.
Nordidk Track sound promising, wiht the instructor being able to control the device, but how useable would that be really?
Anyone got any ideas or suggestions. As you might have guessed, cost is not really the issue.
Comments
Seeing AI?
I've never tried this out, but I'm wondering if Seeing AI or one of the other OCR apps would work on any exercise machines. I've used a few treadmills, stairmasters, and ellipticals before and somebody with working eyeballs always had to adjust them for me. I never had a problem with this, but it would be interesting to try out those scanning apps with these machines. There is now a fitness studio in my apartment building, and I'm currently working with trainers but will eventually graduate to open-studio time. There is at least one treadmill in this studio, and I don't think they'd have a problem with me bringing my iPhone down there and testing things out. One of the trainers was on staff at a nonprofit organization with which I've been involved for several years. She worked with me and a sister of mine who is also a VoiceOver user, and was very interested in the technology side of things. I believe she even majored in visual impairment in college or something like that.
Seeing AI and alternatives.
I have tried seeing AI with my treadmill and bike but it really isn’t much use sadly. I do think theres some light at the end of the tunnel though. The Be My Eyes Be My AI beta is much much better at this kind of thing. It’s great at telling you whats on a screen, it’s pretty great at telling you button layouts, not perfect as it can make things up sometimes but when it works it’s great. There’s also point to speak in iOS 17. Between those 2 apps I think most workout equipment will be pretty usable. Nothing like as good as if they just made them accessible in the first place but until that happens its going to be better than what we have right now.
Thats where Be My AI will step in.
It’s really excellent at understanding context on screens. Like really really good. You can take a photo and it will return a result something like. This is a photo of a control panel for a treadmill, the screen shows a current speed of 8km/h a distance of 4km a time of 30 minutes and 250 callories burned. Then it will describe the buttons underneath. Sometimes this is very good and sometimes much less accurate. The information on the screens is almost always accurate though.