A new app allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text | Hacker News Reader

A new app allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text

in.reuters.com

60 pointssethbannon27 comments

As a totally blind user I won't buy this app. There isn't that much printed material I need to deal with now and there are $5 apps that will generally let me get good enough oCR to determine what junk mail I am getting. I would pay the $99 if it were an in app purchase and the app was limited to say 5 scans a month but with no trial type thing I will not be buying it.

Watching the promotional video[1] of the iPhone app, the one question that springs to mind is how the blind people know how to orient their phone to the objects shown in the video. For instance, reading the hours a store is open: there is no standard place to put that signage, so how likely is this use case to be applied in real world scenarios?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS-i9rn9nao

Many people who are classified as blind have some kind of vision perception — just very, very degraded compared to "normal" vision. So while they might not be able to read, they would be able to at least make educational guesses as to where text might be.

Does anyone know of other similar apps - particularly ones supporting more languages? Specifically - Russian

Would be an awesome gift for my grandfather whose vision has deteriorated significantly due to age. He is 90+, so most of the documents he is actually interested in reading are printed or even hand-written. We've been able to teach him to use an iPad and the built-in voiceover functionality is great for helping read the books/newspapers we pre-load on the device. However it doesn't help much with printed documents - or even just reading the newspaper.

Something like this app really would be a game changer (assuming it's intuitive to use), however it looks like their current language support is only limited to the following: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian.

It's a fairly clever idea, it combines "Google Goggles" instant OCR with instant text-to-speech, to make the phone read out what the camera is seeing.

The one worry i have is that, since modern phones have no tactile input (nevermind feedback), it means a blind person will have a cellphone for the single purpose of being a mobile OCR-reader. Can people with actual experience maybe weigh in on this?

Also, holy damn, i wish it were illegal for journalists to lie in their titles.

Yeah, I clicked on the link thinking, "Wait - actually SEE? How could that possibly work with just an app?"

I have no clue why physical sliding keyboards basically disappeared from "smart phones"... they are not only good for the blinds (I guess they probably make pretty much the same amount of money whether they include it or not)

Actually, as a blind person, typing on a touch screen isn't that hard, and frankly I don't even find myself typing that much with the advent of reasonable dictation. In a majority of cases for short texts I can dash off something as fast as a sighted person, and for longer-form material I will use Siri's dictation for a great speed advantage.

have you ever tried a phone featuring a sliding keyboard? is it not easier/faster then a touch screen?

But that usually comes at a loss for screen space. More screen space gives you more flexibility for more touch interactions (see rotor for voiceover, possible use of assistivetouch, etc.) and more information displayed when zoomed in (if applicable, which is _amazing_ to use for my visually impaired but not blind father). Then I have a mountain of other uses if you want to go into accessibility features for other disabilities, just on iOS.

And if we're talking about typing on a physical device, a fair number of visually impaired folks I know have bluetooth braille displays (e.g. note taking w/iPads in class), or you can sub a regular keyboard to that instead if wanted (if you don't want the display either).

From my sighted but alternative perspective on why physical keyboards built into phones is not the best idea either, I enjoy being able to type in English and Korean, then swap over to Chinese handwriting when needed. I don't have the same thumb typing muscle memory for other languages/layouts than I do for qwerty, so it's great to see what I'm typing occasionally.

I imagine Siri was a life changing. Did you try the swype keyboard? So far has been the best keyboard I have tried.

The real game-changer was VoiceOver, which Apple introduced with the iPhone 3GS in June 2009. Blind people were using their iPhones with VoiceOver for over two years before Apple integrated Siri. Siri is quite convenient though.

As for alternate keyboards, Fleksy has been popular among blind iOS users.

Flesky's website just goes over and over about how it's "the best in the world", but doesn't actually describe the product. Could you tell us a bit about what makes it different?

This may surprise you, but I am a totally blind iPhone user and have been for about 4 years. Before this, I owned a series of Nokia devices, the 6682, N95, etc. Previously, on the s60 devices, we had to purchase a $350 screen reader to make the phone talk. Now, on any iPhone running iOS 4 or later, (so... all of them) I can press the home button 3 times, or just ask Siri to turn on VoiceOver, and I am instantly granted the same level of access to the device that my sighted colleagues expect. Apple is seriously amazing in terms of accessibility -- all of their built-in apps are 100% accessible, all controls labeled, all custom interaction elements given clear accessible descriptions/access tips. Search on YouTube for blind people using the iPhone/iPad, I expect it will blow your mind. Even more awesome than the iPhone's built-in accessibility is the fact that it's so easy for 3rd party developers to make their own apps accessible. All native controls are accessible by default, all you need do as a developer is add labels. For custom controls, such as chess boards, Apple provides an incredibly powerful accessibility API, allowing developers to enable access for anything. I personally play Shredder Chess on the iPhone as the developer has explicitly enabled accessibility for it. There are real blind people using these devices, and I hope you consider this the next time you are thinking about how accessibility fits/doesn't into your next project.

Excuse my curiosity but I got to ask how you experience browsing Hacker News accessibility wise. Can you make out the tree-like ordering of the comments? Can you see that comments are light-grey when they have many downvotes?

Curiosity is *never something to be excused. It's to be celebrated. Anyway, HN is actually not all that great in terms of accessibility. The tree styling of the comments, and the marking of downvotes are both indicated visually and not semantically. It means that I will often have to use context to determine where one thread ends and another begins, or when comments pass my personal taste threshold I just whack page down a few times.

We're working on changing HN's markup, and the new markup should allow us to address the concerns you mention here. We don't know yet when we'll release it, but then will be a good time for us to fix any of these issues that remain. (The look and feel of the site won't change, but more will be indicated semantically.)

I think the best way to represent comment threads with semantic HTML would be using the <ul> element. So the top-level comment thread for a post goes in a <ul> element, and then there's a nested <ul> element for each subthread. Of course, you can use CSS to drop the bullets and adjust the amount of indentation. Then, a screen reader or browser extension can easily provide a way to skip over whole subthreads, without having to do something HN-specific.

That is absolutely amazing- thanks for sharing your story.

I remember learning about an economist named Walter Oi. He was a Japanese-American who was put in an internment camp during WWII.

He later wrote a famous econ paper called "A Disneyland Dilemma" about lump-sum payments to get into the amusement parks coupled with per-ride fees (also about how IBM priced computer time in the 70s): http://people.bath.ac.uk/ecsjgs/Teaching/Industrial%20Organi...

He also was a big proponent after Vietnam of moving the United States military from the draft to an all-volunteer force. His research was instrumental in making that happen.

Overall a very accomplished and impressive individual...Just for extra credit- he was blind.

He did math, graphs, charts, and all the rest without being able to see it.

I am in awe of people like yourself.

It's amazing to hear all the stories of people with disabilities taking advantage of the iPhone's fantastic accessibility features. There really is no excuse for not putting in the extra effort to make these devices usable for everyone.

This was a famous blog post about 4 years ago of a blind iPhone user's first experiences, it's a fantastic read: http://blog.austinseraphin.com/2010/06/12/my-first-week-with...

Around the same time, I heard other stories of Apple devs who were forced to test the iPhone with physical restraints like boxing gloves and blindfolds to ensure they could do just about everything a fully able bodied person could. I can't find any related articles now, I wonder if anyone else could confirm or deny this?

What's your number one recommendation for mobile app developers in terms of enhancing (or not screwing up) accessibility?

If you're feeling extra ambitious, I'd love to hear the same advice with respect to web apps. Has HTML5 made a big difference in terms of accessibility? Are there any obvious big wins for accessibility that most of us are missing?

Thanks for your awesome comment!

For native apps, my biggest single piece of advice is to use the platforms' native UI toolkits. Or use something that wraps those toolkits at a high level, like wxWidgets or Toga (http://pybee.org/toga/). Be careful with wxWidgets though; some of the widgets are custom, and which ones are native or custom varies by platform.

Non-native toolkits, such as Qt or Kivy, can in principle be accessible, but it takes a lot of work to implement each platform's accessibility APIs, and the toolkits often don't get it quite right. This has been the case with Qt on Windows and Mac. And Qt has zero accessibility on iOS, Android, or for that matter, any platform besides Windows, Mac, and desktop Unix. As far as I can tell, Kivy doesn't have any accessibility either.

As for rich web apps, the relevant standard for accessibility is called ARIA (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria). It seems to me, though, that robust, working implementations of ARIA are few and far between. The Dojo Toolkit and YUI Library are well-known for iimplementing ARIA across their widget sets. Of course, those aren't exactly the hot JavaScript libraries these days. jQuery UI also has some level of ARIA support. More recently, I've worked with WinJS (https://github.com/winjs/winjs), and from what I've seen so far, it has pretty good ARIA suppport. I don't know what to tell you, though, if you want to use something more mainstream like Ember, Angular, or Backbone with a smattering of jQuery plugins. I'm afraid I don't have the expertise to offer good advice for developing accessible rich web apps.

Thanks for your detailed response.

The good news with ARIA is that the documentation for ultra-popular Bootstrap 3 includes ARIA support. That's one of the reasons I asked the HTML5 question.

Also, reading your post inspired me to see what's out there for Bootstrap, and I found a very cool toolkit from Paypal[1] that makes Bootstrap's accessibility even better.

Good point about non-native toolkits, although in this day and age using anything other than Qt is extremely painful unless you're targeting a single platform. As popular as Qt is, some association for visually impaired people should take that up as a challenge. I do seem to recall that Qt5 has made some major progress in terms of accessibility, and also that many of their official guides address the issue explicitly.

1. https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/01/28/bootstrap-acce...

I say this as a sighted dev, but I used to volunteer to teach computer basics and programming to visually impaired folks and related things. Feel free to sub in a lot of the visual impairment-specific stuff with other disabilities too, deafness being another big one.

* Learn to use a screenreader and just play with your app/website. Voiceover has a screen curtain you can enable so you don't have the temptation to peek. * Read accessibility documentation for best practices (iOS: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx... Android: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility/i... Web (a decent start, I forget the better ones right now cause it's been a while): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility) * A lot of times, making your app easier and simpler for new users to use (i.e. ux improvements) will have the side benefit of making it more accessible and vice versa ;) * Reach out to blind users if you have any, and ask them for tips and problems. * When you get someone reaching out to you about how inaccessible something is, work with them to fix it if you can (you'd be surprised....) * Check out your local groups/conferences/hackathons, I've seen some great projects needing help and lots of people sharing their knowledge on this front (one that comes to mind is Yahoo Accessibility down in LA in the past when I used to live there)

Sometimes even I fuck up on this front, and it's definitely a constant checking-your-privileges and rethinking things battle. The one thing that keeps me going is this: there will be times where all of us will benefit from accessibility, even if it's not a permanent or big problem. I try to do what I can on this front for my own work/hobbies, hoping it helps someone else. And I thank the person that had the foresight to reserve the front buses on seats for people with disabilities because I need it right now. :P

>* Learn to use a screenreader and just play with your app/website.

Excellent advice. I'll start testing my sites with a screenreader in addition to IE8 and all other other usual suspects. I also just found a cool toolkit for Bootstrap 3 (I use Bootstrap a lot):

https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/01/28/bootstrap-acce...

If you're interested learning about accessibility —especially the broader issues outside of problems with vision — I'd strongly recommend having a look at http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/a-web-for-everyone/

(Disclaimer: One of the authors is a friend so I may be a bit biased, but we did first encounter each other on discussions about accessibility in the 90's ;-)

The technical advice in it is mostly written for web folk, but the framework of accessibility/UX it places that advice in is pretty much applicable to anything.

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