iPhone iOS Accessibility Apps and Features

Some Interesting accessibility features and apps for iPhone

iPhone iOS features and accessibility

App Store: apps for accessibility

– Voice Dream Reader has been around since 2012. It is a text to speech app which is able to read different kinds of file types. Mostly it is used by people who suffer from dyslexia or other sorts of learning disabilities.  Voice Dream Reader is basically a kind of reading tool for iOS and Android, and it is very versatile. This app can provide numerous options for reading and navigating texts. Users can navigate text in many ways, for example sentence by sentence, or by paragraph, page or chapter. They can also add their own bookmarks or various notes. Text can also be highlighted, there is an option to adjust reading speed, and there is also a very hand pronunciation dictionary.

– Apple Maps have also changed in the last years. Now, they also use Voice Over so vision-impaired people can follow and explore interesting roads using Apple Maps.

– Seeing Eye GPS is an app navigation which is specifically designed for vision-impaired iPhone users. The Seeing Eye GPS is basically a kind of turn-by-turn GPS app. It has all the usual navigation features that are present in many other apps, but it also adds features that make life much easier for blind or vision impaired users. For example, instead of having menus in multiple layers, the app has the three most important elements of navigation placed on the lower portion of every screen. These elements are called Route, Location and POI (point of interest). It gives users heads-up, alerts and intersection descriptions. When using this app at intersections, the street that crosses the current street will be announced, along with its orientation. In the same manner the intersections will be described. All the user needs to do is to point it in a direction. The app uses three choices for data of POI and these are Navteq, OSM and Foursquare. Directions are automatically set for pedestrian or vehicle routes, and they include announcements for upcoming turns. Anytime the user goes off the route, the route is recalculated and the updated info is announced. But it is also important to mention the price at this point. The app costs $200 and this is its biggest flaw.

 

AAC users can use features for speech assistance like Proloque4Text so that they don’t have to type every word and phrase by themselves but there are prediction shortcuts which can be used. Proloquo2Go help users to use symbols and photos in order to form a phrase. Theis symbol-based tool has 25000 symbols in its base, but users can also upload their own. This feature is mostly used by younger generations and it helps to work on the language and motor skills.