I continue to work feverishly on my book, iOS Access for All. The writing is going well, but there is always more to say than I had thought. All of my initial page counts were low. As I work toward finishing the VoiceOver chapter, I’m looking ahead to the chapters about iOS apps. One will feature all of the Apple-supplied apps, and address their accessibility features and limitations. The second app chapter covers the best tools in all major categories, with an eye on accessibility. So, I will be writing about both the best reading app that happens to have…
Tag: accessibility
Kindle Accessibility: So What?
Posted in Access and Disability, General Store, and New Media and Tech
Amazon announced yesterday that its Kindle app for iOS had been updated to provide “more accessibility.” In fact, the update (with the inauspicious version number, 3.7) turns a largely inaccessible app into one that VoiceOver screen reader users can rely upon to read, navigate, and manage the contents of a Kindle library. And they did a great job, not merely making the app usable, but opening all Kindle iOS features up to VO. The fact that blind people have Kindle libraries, given the limited native accessibility of Amazon’s hardware and mobile apps, is testament to the company’s dominant place in…
Apple Versus Samsung, My Take
Posted in Access and Disability, Announcements, and New Media and Tech
Here is a story I wrote for Stabley Times about the latest Samsung lawsuit against Apple. This one is all about a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, the accessibility of iOS.
I’ll get right to the point: the iPhone 3G S includes several features that should make Apple’s smartphone accessible to many blind and visually impaired people for the first time. And rejoicing was heard in the land? We’ll see what we’ll see. The new phone, debuted at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, and due for release on June 19, includes a version of Apple’s VoiceOver, the screen reader built into Mac OS X. Since we learned at its launch two years ago that the iPhone is an OS X-adjacent device, lots of accessibility advocates, including me, have suggested that lighting…