Questions about Made for iPhone hearing aids and their companion apps

By Tim Culhane, 4 January, 2018

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

hi all,

As you may know many made for iPhone hearing aids come with accompanying apps.
These apps allow the user to make changes to the settings on the aids, among other things.

I'm considering starting a trial with the latest Resound Lynx 3D hearing aids.
This comes with the Resound Smart 3D app.

I previously tried an older resound made for iPhone model. However, I found that it did not work with Voiceover very well.

Problems I had included the fact that Voiceover would not speak when other audio such as music, phone calls etc were playing.
Also, Voiceover could not be used to reliably change the hearing aid settings.
Lastly occasionally the phone would simply lock up and I would need to restart it again.

I was hoping that with my new iPhone 8 + iOS 11 and the latestResound hearing aid technology that things might have improved.

I did contact Resound about this issue and got the following response:

"
Unfortunately our apps do not support the Voiceover feature. The reason for this is because our hearing aids do not support mixed streaming.
"

Can people explain to me what "mixed streaming" means?

Have anybody had success using the latest Resound hearing aids + the smart 3D app with Voiceover?

If not, do any other made for iPhone hearing aid manufactures develop apps with work properly with Voiceover?

Many thanks,

Tim

Options

Comments

By cat_lover on Monday, January 8, 2018 - 02:00

I don't know what they mean by "mixed streaming", but my Resound hearing aids are a year old and I've been able to use VO with music playing, or while on a phone call or whatever. I don't particularly find the app all that useful, but any changes that need to be made I've been able to make through the accessibility shortcut on my phone, or from one of the buttons on the hearing aids itself.

By Tim Culhane on Monday, January 8, 2018 - 02:00

In reply to by cat_lover

hi,

Thanks for the update.

As I understand it, via the app you can change the treble and base settings along with changing the direction of the microphones etc.

Can this be done from the accessibility shortcut?

Tim

By Scott Davert on Friday, February 8, 2019 - 02:00

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Hi Tim.
I've had my Quattro Pro ReSound hearing aids for a week now and here is what I can tell you for sure. When you wish to either go into the iOS hearing devices menu through the added control wigit or through the accessibility shortcut, you will be somewhat limited in your options. For example, you will get the status of your hearing aids' batteries for both ears if you have 2, you will be told what program is active, the hearing aids' microphone volume, and there is an option to turn live listen and off. If you double tap on the not of your devics, like Scott's hearing aids, you will then have the option to choose from any of the preinstalled programs. You do not need the app to control these features. However, there are things you can only do on the app within programs such as in the "all around" program, you can enable a sound filter or change focus to speech. There is also an option within the app to mute your hearing aids and another to control whether whatever you are doing impacts one or both ears. There is also a "sound enhancer" feature which allows you to add bass, treble, and mid range to whatever program you are in. However, even though these elements are sliders, which VoiceOver calls adjustable items, VoiceOver doesn't see these sliders as anything other than a text element, so VoiceOver doesn't realize it should be able to modify either of these settings. so while the app is certainly useful, it could be much more so if it were made more useable for VoiceOver users. I know this forum topic is over a year old, but I happened to find it while browsing what we have on these devices so I thought I'd reply now. If you can't use the info, perhaps someone else can.

hi Scott,

I've been using the Resound aids for almost a year now and I do find them good, other than the fact that the app is pretty much useless for Voiceover users.

The biggest problem is that since I'm using Voiceover to manage the setting in the app it automatically switches to the iPhone program.
It doesn't seem possible to edit the settings on other programs like the 'all around' pprogram or the restaurant program without changing to them first. But you are in a sort of catch 22 situation because if you want to use Voiceover then you are stuck in the iPhone program because the aids picks up on streaming audio coming from the phone.

It would be great if you could change other program settings without having to switch to that program.
Also if the sliders worked that would obviously be important.

Long term it would be great if there was no need for a separate streaming program for audio coming from the phone to the aids. You could simply use the all around program or whatever one you liked and the phone audio would be treated exactly like any other audio you hear.

Tim