iOS VoiceOver vs Mac App braille

Submitted by jasonstevanhill on Saturday, November 2, 2013.
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Braille on Apple Products

Hi! I'm Jason from Choice of Games. We have long received messages from blind and visually impaired individuals for producing our games, emails for which we are very grateful. The VoiceOver feature on iOS apparently makes our games very accessible. About six months ago, we started publishing our games to the Mac App store. Recently, they've stopped approving them, saying that we provide no lasting entertainment value. Obviously, we disagree with this, but this is definitely an uphill battle. The reason that I'm posting here is because someone wrote in, asking why our latest release (the ORPHEUS Ruse) wasn't yet out on the Mac App store. He said that while VoiceOver was great, the braille reader (?) for Mac Apps were a superior interface for him. This was news to us. So, the question I have for you: is this braille reader (if I'm saying that right) really that much more helpful? We haven't seen a lot of sales on the Mac App store, so we're not super excited about getting into a fight with Apple over this. But if you all said, hey, it really is much better, then that's something we would fight for. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Best, -Jason Stevan Hill Choice of Games LLC jason@choiceofgames.com http://www.choiceofgames.com/

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Submitted by Piotr Machacz on Saturday, November 2, 2013

FIrst, I'm surprised Apple is rejecting your apps for this reason only on one platform but not the other. I can't really answer if braille support in Voiceover on the mac is better than iOS as I don't have a bluetooth braille display that I could try on my iPod touch, but I definitely see 2 other advantages on the mac. The first is that the Mac has much better voices, and a much bigger selection. The default Alex voice is much better to read books with than anything that iOS gives you, so playing choice of games with him is a lot better. The second thing is, while you are releasing the games in the Chrome web store, Safari is a lot more popular with blind people - and anything that has an embedded HTML view in a mac app uses the web kit engine that Safari is also using. While Chrome does have an extension called Chromevox which gives you speech in Chrome, in my opinion it has some shortcomings which make it not as easy to use as Safari.