Requesting feedback on new audiobook playback app - Pastime

Hi Thom,

First of all, thanks very much for taking the time to use the app and to offer your feedback. For us, collecting feedback and verifying any assumptions we have made is crucial in ending up with a useful app.

I hear you regarding mp3 playback. We've opted to start with a very narrow feature-set in order to get it out there sooner rather than later and started the process of collecting feedback. As a result, we decided not to tackle how content gets onto the device in audiobook format, but I agree that this is a big challenge for users, whether or not they experience any visual impairments.

With regard to your comment on VoiceOver -- as part of our narrow focus with this initial release, we opted to target users who experience some form of visual impairment, but not blind users. There are two reasons for this:

1) The original target user was my grandmother-in-law (Donna) who suffers from macular-degeneration. She was coming to touch devices quite late in life, and as a result the learning curve for VoiceOver was simply too great to overcome. She needed something that was fairly forgiving with regard to her interactions, but also something that was extremely simplistic. The original version of Pastime was meant to assist her (and others like her) who weren't familiar with VO, but wanted a way to listen to audiobooks on their own.
** One assumption here is that a user like her will always require help from someone else to get the audiobooks synced on the device. This really sucks (and it's not our fault that Apple makes it so difficult!), but in order to get something useful out there, it was an assumption that had to be made.

2) We felt that attempting to create an app that was optimal both for visually-impaired users and blind users out of the gate was trying to do too much. So for this release we've tried something very basic (audiobook playback) for users with limited sight. Eventually we would love to evolve the app to the point where it addresses both visually impaired and blind users. First step was to create a nice user experience for the initial target audience, and then build out from there.

I would love to know: in terms of this community, do many of you fit into the target audience described above? I.e., do you use an iOS device without VoiceOver enabled, but still experience some degree of visual impairment? We'd love to hear your stories and apps you love so that we can make ours better.

Regards,
Andrew

[email protected]

Greetings amtk62,

Thank you for your comments. Some of what I've just written in my reply to Thom is relevant here, but I'll restate the key thoughts:

You wrote:
"With that said, however, I think VoiceOver support in your app is an absolute "must" if you are wishing for it to be adopted by visually impaired users. While self-voicing apps might seem like a good idea to sighted people, why reinvent the wheel when VoiceOver already does everything you could possibly want?"
* As I mentioned to Thom, the main reason for not using VoiceOver is that not all users use VoiceOver. I agree that VoiceOver is an outstanding accessibility framework -- but I also believe that there is a non-trivial learning curve for it. So you have some users who don't use VO b/c they can see well enough to navigate but still struggle with typical rendering, and you have others (like my grandmother-in-law) who would never be able to learn how to navigate with VoiceOver because the learning curve is too steep.

In any case, I would love to create an app the worked great both in and out of VoiceOver mode, but we needed to start somewhere.

The question I now pose is: does this app provide a nice user experience for visually-impaired non VO users? If the answer is still no, then I'd love to hear why. Or maybe "yes, but", or whatever. The more candid feedback and context the better.

Thanks again to you and the community.

Best,
Andrew