Harrison introduces **Deyesfree **, an accessible dice rolling app built specifically with VoiceOver users in mind. Rather than adapting a traditional visual interface, the app was designed from the ground up to provide a fast, intuitive experience for blind and low vision users while remaining equally enjoyable for anyone looking for a simple digital dice roller. Throughout the introduction, Harrison shares the story behind the app, the inspiration for creating it, and the accessibility decisions that shaped its development.
The demonstration begins with a guided tour of the app's interface before moving into practical examples of rolling dice for games such as Monopoly, Yahtzee, and Dungeons & Dragons. Harrison shows how to create custom dice rolls, save frequently used presets, hold individual dice while re-rolling the rest, review previous rolls using the history feature, sort dice, and customize the app's speech and sound settings. Along the way, he explains how each feature helps make tabletop gaming faster and more enjoyable without requiring users to work around a sighted interface.
As the episode continues, Harrison explores several of the app's advanced capabilities, including Bluetooth keyboard support, configurable voice speed, optional ambient sound effects, multilingual support, and integration with Siri Shortcuts. He also demonstrates the Apple Watch companion, showing how players can quickly roll common dice directly from their wrist or access synchronized presets from the iPhone app. These features work together to create an experience that is both accessible and efficient whether you're playing a casual board game or a lengthy tabletop role-playing campaign.
Whether you're an experienced tabletop gamer, new to role-playing games, or simply interested in thoughtfully designed accessible software, this episode provides an excellent look at how accessibility can enhance—not limit—the user experience. Harrison's walkthrough highlights both the practical features of Deyesfree and the design philosophy behind creating an app that feels truly native for VoiceOver users.
Thinking About Giving It a Try?
If Deyesfree sounds like something you'd enjoy, it's available as a free download from the App Store. The app is developed by Harrison Tu and is designed to make rolling dice quick, intuitive, and fully accessible for VoiceOver users while remaining just as useful for low vision and sighted players. According to the current App Store listing, the app is available at no cost and falls under the Entertainment category. ([App Store][1])
You can learn more or download the app using the following resources:
- App Store: DeyesFree on the App Store
- AppleVis App Directory: DeyesFree on AppleVis
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Harrison: Hello everyone. Um hello Apple Vis. My name is Harrison2, and I am here to demonstrate an app that I just shall we say re-released to the App Store. This app This app is an app that's kind of been in the making for about five years, but finally came into its own in the last couple of months. I am the developer of this, but I'm also a native voiceover user and so this app was definitely designed with native voiceover users in mind. Now the app is called DIECE Free, that's D-E-Y-E-S-F-R-E-E, and it is a portmanteau of the word dice and eyes free. So what is dice free? Essentially dice free is a app that allows you to roll different configurations of dice, you can roll them, the standard 2d6 that you would use for something like Monopoly, but you can also roll D12s, D10s, D8s, D20s, basically anything you could possibly need. for more advanced dice games such as Dung Dungeons and Dragons, you can roll several dice. So for example, if you need something like Yahtzee, you can roll several dice. it's meant to be full featured enough that it is useful, but basic enough that it's not confusing to people. And so I'm here to demonstrate it. So I'm gonna pull out my phone and demonstrate the app. So before I actually do the demonstration, I wanna talk a little bit about the history and more the why of this app, because this app can be demonstrated. , but I want to talk about the why I made this. So there are of course a lot of other dice rolling apps on iOS. I can name about three, I'm not gonna name them here because that's really not the point. the point is that I've never seen one that kind of did everything I wanted it to do, and nothing that I didn't. Either the apps were just a little too complicated, or they didn't feel voiceover intuitive. They felt like I'm working around a sighted interface and when you are playing a game like Dungeons and Dragons with your sighted peers. Or even with blind peers, but with your sighted peers. you don't want that. You want to be able to roll quickly, as quickly as they can. And I wanted to make something that was voiceover optimized. , so there's a couple things that I did. Number one, I really was very thoughtful about the interface to make it work for both blind and low vision users. The second thing is I wanted to implement a lot of things that were familiar. One thing that I did do was implement Bluetooth keyboard support so that it could be used on a Mac or with an iPhone with a Bluetooth keyboard, David Greenwood of GMA Dice, who I won't deny was my was my br I guess inspiration for some of this. he created a very beautiful Windows Dice app called GMA Dice back in the early two thousands, and that is what I was trying to emulate with the iPhone. So there's that. It does have Bluetooth keyboard support. It's not something I can show within the confines of this review just because I do not have a Bluetooth keyboard handy as I'm recording this. But it does have Bluetooth keyboard support. And there's information on how to use that in the help docs, but it creates almost a a separate layer of even more efficientness with that. And the third thing was okay, there's two more things. Number three, I wanted it to be free. To me, it was very important that it is free so that all blind people who want to play something like Dungeons and Dragons or other table games are able to play. I don't want price to be a barrier, so I decided to make the dice app free. I got voice actors to just read all the stuff because that was the other thing that was very important to me was to make it read with human speech. And it is something I achieved on the Apple Watch about five years ago. But I rebuilt it. I wanted to build it bigger and better and get it off the Apple Watch and onto the iPhone. There''ss there just a lot of things I wanted to do. , and one of the thing I wanted to do was make it international. these games are not just played in the English speaking world, and I wanted to make sure that it was available to those who would need it. I have been able to produce the app in English, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Portuguese. So there are localizations and audio files for all five of those languages. So I am going to launch into the demonstration portion. Alright. So this is days free. It says dies free. eloquence says days free. Double tap to open.
VoiceOver: Day free held button held button
Harrison: so you first land on the help button. There are a set of controls on the top and I'm gonna go through those. The first is help that opens a help help dialogue that you can kind of read a a basic manual of this app. History button. There's the history button that will come into its own a little later and I'll I'll show you that a little later. Settings, button. There's the settings. and I'll go into there a little later as well. There's the heading. Roll to begin. So it says roll to begin. That means there isn't a role right now. and you can roll to begin. So you can button. You see the button re-roll. So So this is a re-roll button,, but there's nothing being rolled yet,
VoiceOver: so custom roll button. Choose the number of dice and size, then roll.
Harrison: So that's what we're gonna do first. We're gonna do a custom roll. So let's pretend I'm playing Yahtzee. or actually that's not a good example. Let's pretend we're playing Monopoly. We need two D6. So it'll ask
VoiceOver: Tel Number of Dice. Text field is editing.
Harrison: How many dice are you rolling? So let's say I'm rolling two? Two.
VoiceOver: Number of sides, number of sides. For example six. Text field.
Harrison: And yes, I'm rolling six.
VoiceOver: Number of number of sides.
Harrison: Then there's this modifier. Now what is a modifier? It is used in some more advanced dice games where you can add or subtract a fixed number.
VoiceOver: Selected, plus, minus, selected, plus, minus, multiplier amount add it to the total, for example to text field.
Harrison: So let's say I need two d6, but add two to that, I can do that there, and then I can press the roll speed. And I want you to hear what it sounds like when I roll the dice. So I'm gonna turn off speech. So as you see it's a human voice that's saying the dice rolls. And that to me was always very important. , back in the days there was an app called GMA Dice, and one of the chief complaints I always had about it was it used recorded text-to-speech clips and that was something I always meant to rectify in this version. So this version actually uses human role human voice clips for anything that's not voiced by voiceover. And if you have voice over off, there's a lot of other things that kind of come into effect. That use human voices for low vision users. So this app is not just for blind users, it's for low vision users and there's a lot of human voice that guide you if you're having trouble using the screen but don't use voiceover
VoiceOver: okay days we edit through these three roll
Harrison: through these total nine so it says two d6 total nine. That means in the standard dice notation that means two six-sided dice and the total is nine. Now what if I need to see what that what dice those are?
VoiceOver: Speech for speed and rate, words, characters, voices, green record, defending.
Harrison: Then I can go to headings. I can go to the dice heading.
VoiceOver: Voice it's green with headings.
Harrison: I'll show you some of this later.
VoiceOver: Dice, die one three. Dice two six.
Harrison: But I rolled a three and a six. Now let's say I want to hold this six. I can double tap it. That marks it. So once you mark it, it's not going to move. It's gonna stay right where it is, and I can re-roll. Now there's several ways to re-roll. There is the re-roll button from up top. If you are a voiceover user, you can do a magic tap.
VoiceOver: 11. Save die one. Five.. Save acted Die two.
Harrison: And as you see that die stayed there. Or a no matter what kind of user you are, voiceover or non voiceover, you can shake your phone.
VoiceOver: Eight.
Harrison: And it'll roll again. And as you see that die held. So I'm gonna I'm gonna unmark it. There's also an unmark all button if you need to, if you have multiple dice that are marked, an unmark butt all button appears and you can do that. Now that's a custom roll. But what if you roll button? , I'm gonna go through some of these things later. But what if I wanna roll something that I roll a lot? There are twelve preset slots. Presets one through preset twelve,
VoiceOver: preset one, one D two, preset two, one D6, preset three, through D6, reset four, one D twenty, preset five, through D twenty, reset six, one D four, reset seven, one D eight, reset eight, through D eight,
Harrison: reset nine, one D ten reset These are some very common presets that I might have to roll. And so let's say I want to re-roll a 1D100, all I have to do is tap here.
VoiceOver: Five. Eighty one.
Harrison: And it'll roll that die. Now, let's say I never need one,.
VoiceOver: one I don't need two D ten,
Harrison: let's say 'cause two D ten gets captured into one D one hundred. I can hit clear. It says deleted. And now I can assign it to something else. So I can set up number of dice.
VoiceOver: Text field.
Harrison: Let's say I need two dice.
VoiceOver: Number of dice.
Harrison: And the sides are one thousand. Let's see, I'd need two one thousand sided die. I don't need a monitor, or a modifier. And I save the preset.
VoiceOver: Preset save.
Harrison: Preset save.
VoiceOver: Preset five.
Harrison: So let's say I roll this now.
VoiceOver: One thousand fifteen. Reset ten, through D one thousand. One thousand, one hundred, seventeen.
Harrison: And as you hear, it is rolling those now. So that is how you mark dice, how you use presets. There's a couple other buttons on top that I want to show. There's a re-roll. Button. There's custom roll button as you saw. Sort button. There's a sort button. All that does is sort the dice in the dice tray.
VoiceOver: Sort the dice from lows to dice and clear box. Sorted.
Harrison: And so now if we go, six tie one,
VoiceOver: five hundred and eleven, tie two, six, hundred, and six.
Harrison: It's hard to see this, but essentially they are now lowest to highest. Now I can read the result.
VoiceOver: Two. D one thousand. Total. One thousand.
Harrison: That's the summary. And then there's a read all dice button.
VoiceOver: Five hundred, eleven, six hundred, six total, one, thousand, one hundred, seventeen.
Harrison: And that's how that works. so there's those. I want to show a couple of the buttons on top. I mean this is really as simple as this app gets. If you need to go back to an old role, there's the history.
VoiceOver: History. S2D1D13. Total 81 dice 81.
Harrison: So I can load this roll to the tree. Exactly. So I can go through my past rolls because sometimes it's oh what was it? Oh oops, I didn't mean to re-roll that. I can just load
VoiceOver: this total.
Harrison: And there it goes, straight back into the dice tray. And so now I can manipulate it just like any other roll. I I can view it, I can sort it, I can mark things and re-roll things and and those will show up in the history and all that. Settings. So I want to take a quick trip through settings. Um settings.
VoiceOver: Head in. Done. But voice. Head in.
Harrison: So first is the voice.
VoiceOver: Voice speed.
Harrison: This does have a built-in speech rate for the woman's voice that's speaking. So you can change it from essentially point five times her speed to two point five times speed 2.6 times. You've been hearing her at 1.6. So you could go faster or slower from here. Sounds heading. Now sounds. So you can either turn dice roll sounds on or off. that's not going to affect the woman speaking, that's going to affect the actual sound of the dice that you're hearing. So if you don't care to hear the throw of the dice, you don't care about that atmosphericness, you can get your result much quicker. Tavern ambience. Then there's tavern ambience. some dice rollers prefer to have just a tavern ambience coming out of their speaker. It's just some background ambient noise. You can turn that on or off. Comes off by default obviously or else you wouldn't hear voiceover. If you have voice over off at first launch, then it actually comes on by default. because a lot of sighted people do prefer this. Chat mode this is a holdover from GMA Dice and I'll let the program explain that to you. So sometimes if you're playing, let's say, over a phone and you want to make sure that people trust what you're rolling, then you would use something like chat mode.
VoiceOver: Speak totals. Switch button.
Harrison: Oh. And this is the last setting, and it does this.
VoiceOver: Speaks the total of the each roll. Total to the individual types sorted total instead. For games like conceal file where the total doesn't matter.
Harrison: So some games like Yahtzee and Farkel aren't as dependent as the total as something like Monopoly or Dungeons and Dragons. Instead you just wanna hear the all the dice. I'm gonna
VoiceOver: switch but
Harrison: I'm gonna turn it off, and then I'm gonna hit done.
VoiceOver: Read result. Sort custom roll.
Harrison: And I'm gonna do a custom roll of six D six.
VoiceOver: Modify modified number of size, number of sides. For example, not six. Six. Modify remote, modify roll, roll, button, while th And I'm gonna re-roll
Harrison: with speech off just for you guys here.
VoiceOver: One, two, two, three, five, six.
Harrison: Okay, so essentially that's what speak totals does. there's one more thing I want to show, which is its integration with Apple Watch. So now I'm gonna put my phone down.
VoiceOver: Voices, mic settings. Voices, speech volume. What doth what doth what doth what doth what was it?
Harrison: So here's the dyes free app. And unfortunately with this you do have to turn off voiceover. it's just kinda how it goes. It says it's a two D six right now, but I can tap it. And it rolls the dice. I can switch between multiple different common types of dice with the swiping left and right? Four, six, eight, ten, twelve, twenty, twelve, ten, eight, six, four, two. And you hear you can get to the end. One thing I didn't show. if you roll a 1D2, so that is normally a coin toss, you get a slightly different sound. Tails. Heads. And it'll say heads or tails. You can also shake the watch to roll. I'm literally just shaking the watch, or you can tap. And if you want to roll something that is not in that 2468 10 12 20 block. Because you can only roll up to six of each, you can twist the digital crown and go through your presets.
VoiceOver: Two D six one D twenty two one D four one two D eight one D ten two D ten One D twelve One D one hundred one D 10, 2, D, 8, 1, D, 8.
Harrison: And the presets do sync. sometimes they do take a while to sync over from the phone to the watch. and in this case, they yeah, it didn't quite sync, so that is what it is. But the presets will sync given enough time, and the voice speed will also sink from the phone to the watch. There is one more thing I can show you which is if you have one open this twenty zero so that's twenty one d eight double one done. Okay, one D eight. see You that's the last thing that was rolled. Double tap it. It says total seven. So that's a a complication. So if you need to just roll quickly from a complication, that's how you can do it. One more feature. , this does have series support, so from my phone I can say roll a die with dies free Five or I can say roll three D six with dies free.
VoiceOver: One, two, six.
Harrison: Yep. So it can roll dice using Siri shortcuts, and all that is explained in the help documentation. that's really all there is to this app. It's not a complicated app by any means. And so yeah, if you have any questions about it, you can message me on this forum and I'm happy to answer them. So thank you, everyone.