AppleVis Blog

We are pleased and excited to announce that two members of the AppleVis community have very kindly offered to donate a $20 iTunes Gift Card each month for us to giveaway to one lucky user of the site.

This wonderful gesture is in recognition of what we are trying to achieve here at AppleVis, and to help us make this an even more valuable resource to the community.

To be in with a chance of winning the Gift Card, you simply need to post any of the following to the site during the month:

We are pleased to announce that the latest iOS app to be inducted into our App Hall of Fame is Digit-Eyes Audio Scanner and Labeler.

For some time it was looking like this would be an extremely close vote, with several apps appearing to be in contention. However, Digit-Eyes ultimately won out as the firm choice of AppleVis users, gaining more than double the number of votes of its nearest challenger.

Anybody calling Amtrak's Customer Service in recent months is likely to have encountered a recorded message in which they were encouraged to use the company's iOS app.

According to this message, the app enables you to check the status and times of trains and buy tickets, meaning that there is no need to wait in a queue for your call to be answered. Or at least that is the case if you are sighted. Anybody who relies on VoiceOver will soon find themselves back in the queue, as these features of the app are not accessible.

I've just added a new page to this site that lists iOS apps developed specifically for the blind or people with low vision.

With the benefit of hindsight, this seems like something that we should have done some time ago, but they do say better late than never ... right? <smile>

I'm not sure if you listen to Harry Shearer's interesting weekend program Le Show, but his May 20th show is much more interesting as he uses Siri several times during the 1-hour program to remind us all of the weaknesses of artificial intelligence. The show starts with a humorous conversation between Harry and Siri. and Siri also shows up a few more times throughout the program, but her final appearance in the form of a conversation with "Ralph the talking computer," in the last 5 minutes of the show, is quite funny.

When I heard the news of the release of iOS 5, I didn't own an iDevice. However, I was thrilled to know that it'll provide Premium voices as well as the previous ones which are now called Compact voices. So I was looking forward to trying them as soon as I got my iPhone 4S. I used to think that my 4S came with the Premium voices though I didn't have the "Use compact voice" option under Settings->General->Accessibility->VoiceOver -- I was wrong. Honestly, I was mistaken partly because I was pleased with the way the Compact voices were functioning.

As I finished reading How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone in The Atlantic, I couldn't resist sharing it with you. I'm pleased to see that Apple's access-oriented efforts are deservedly being brought into the limelight. It'll also help developers become fully aware of access issues and the infrastructure which is available to them if they wish to work on accessibility. Moreover, the article touches on something which is also my own concern -- literacy and spelling issues. This isn't related to Apple at all and is more of a side-effect of using a speech-based screen reader on whatever platform -- mobile or non-mobile.

Every two weeks, our team will hand-pick an app from the past two weeks that we believe is a must-download for your iPhone or iPad. These apps will always be from various categories, but they are chosen because our own team members love them and have been using them daily. So here is this week’s pick! Enjoy!

Scanner911 Police Radio Pro

Know what is really going on. Listen in on police and fire crews in your local area!