All Articles Tagged accessibility

TiPb’s been saying Apple’s accessibility technology is thumbs up for a while now, but the New York Times and legendary film critic Roger Ebert are giving real-world examples of just how good — and inexpensive — these new offerings are.

The NYT tells us Kara Lynn was given a deliberately crippled PC for $8,000 for text-to-speech, but instead she bought her own iPhone 3G and a $15 text-to-speech app, that was both less expensive but also provided greater mobility and functionality. (iPhone 3GS and iPod touch G3 include built-in VoiceOver and other accessibility features).

Ebert wrote in saying he likewise ditched the $8,000 PC after giving it a test drive, and instead went with his own MacBook, which again provided greater features and flexibility.

Again, kudos to Apple for emphasizing accessibility.

[Via AppleInsider]

Speaking of iPhone 3GS accessibility features, it looks like Apple is improving them in iPhone 3.1 Beta 2 by adding a new “triple click” option to the home button to toggle VoiceOver, Toggle White on Black, and Ask (which then will pop up a menu offering Turn VoiceOver On, Turn Zoom On, Turn White on Black On).

Kudos to Apple for not only doing a great job implementing the various accessibility features in iPhone 3GS, but for continuing to improve them via forthcoming firmware.

According to David Pogue in the New York Times, the accessibility features like VoiceOver introduced with the iPhone 3GS make it one of the easiest smartphones for the blind and visually impaired:

First, you tap something to hear it. You can tap icons, words, even the tiny status icons at the top of the screen. As you go, the voice tells you what you’re tapping. “Messages.” “Calendar.” “Mail — 14 new items.” “45 percent battery power.”

Once enabled in the settings, Pogue details how new gestures like double-tap to launch, two-finger upward flick to read, three finger flick to scroll or go to next/previous screen, and three finger triple tap to turn the screen off and save power.

You can also use “the rotor”, a two finger circle, to change the way other gestures work — proofreading text character by character rather than word by word, for example.

Supported languages included Bahasa Indonesian, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Dutch, English (US), English (UK), English (Australian), Finnish, French (Canada), French (France), German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Thai, Turkish.

For more on VoiceOver, see Apple’s overview.