Category: accessible Devices
I'm looking at maybe getting a touch screen phone. But as someone who has never used one I have no idea how they work. I'm used to 5 way navigation keys and such. So question. Do all touch screen phones work the same? Do they all make it so when you're looking for something it doesn't work until you lift your finger? When you text can you lift a finger before a letter is activated or are there some touch screen phones that don't have this feature? Any help or info is appreciated. Thanks,
Aimee
Anothr question. I've seen touch screen phones online that have vibrating feedback. How usefull is this if you allready have a talking program on these phones?
the only touch screen i really have any experience with is the iPhone. . There is a few ways to use that one. you can use a swipe or flicking motion with one finger across the the screen from left to right or right to left to go in reverse to scroll through all the options on a given screen. Then double tap anywhere on the screen to activate the last spoken item. Also you can navigate around the screen with a finger and it will say whateve you put your finger on .. this highlights that particular item, once its highlighted you can just double tap anywhere else on the screen to activate that item. there is also the split finger method . navigate around the screen to find an item and highlight it as mentioned previously, but keep your finger on it and use another finger to tap once anywhere else on the screen. However for typing u can use any of the above methose or you can turn on touch typeing which meands for letters numbers space bar and punctuations u can use a finger to navigate the screen till you find what character you would like then pull your finger off to type that character. I believe android phones has something similiar to touch but uses it for navigating the whole phone not just the keyboard, typing and vibrates when your finger highlights something on the screen. The iPhone is the most accessible out of the box right now for touch screens and with some of the recent improvements i decided it was time to make the plunge into that world.
Okay cool thanks for the info
If you rely on the phone for heavy data entry use, meaning you want to write a ton of messages / tweets and the like on it, a touch screen is probably not for you. Enterprise customers are not deploying touch screens for users who are doing this. However, the iPhone is rather a cute little thing, with a bit of time you'll probably be just fine with it for your home / pleasure use, the occasional text message and tweet, especially where time is not of the essence.
There are some Windows Mobile phones that have a combination touch screen / keyboard, the touch being for navigation, the keyboard for input. These are being deployed because the keyboard allows fast data input.
If you don't need to enter a lot of data fast, you'll probably have fun like the millions of others with your iPhone.
Just an interesting thing I heard, I was reading on a mailing list earlier today, with the new keyboard method for typing, folks are claiming to touch 40 WPM with iOS 4. My use thus far was limited, but I'd say that I felt as if I was typing faster than the older split tap method.
my phone has both touch screen and keyboard with mobileSpeak installed, it's a good phone. and you forgot to mention with the IPhone, it supports bluetooth keyboards now so saying typing with it is not for more than just texting and stuff isn't true anymore.
Provided you have said keyboard with you, of course, that is correct. However your phone would be more deployable as it contains all the user needs in one device. This isn't an attack on the iPhone, just a matter of what the user is going to need.
Truth be told even with my Windows Mobile phone for years I still carried a Sto away blue tooth keyboard for text input if I wanted to do some serious typing. Deffinitly having BT support is welcomed.
I connected a focus 40 blue to an iPhone 3gs upgraded to iOs 4 and was pretty impressed at navigating and reading from the display. I still can't completely decide if I'll jump ship to at&t and get the iPhone, but I plan to make a decision in the next week or two. I'm installing the new MS 4.5 to see if it really offers any features I'll find helpful and if not, I'll bail.
i'm debating on the MS upgrade myself, but i'm stuck with vzw for over another year at least for now
alot of people also don't realize how good the auto correction on the iPhone keyboard is, its not just your standard predictive mode try to guess what you are typing based on the letters pressed so far but it also actually has a corrective ness to it .. like if you are typing fast and mist spelled a word with a letter clost to it , like for example i discovered with typing the word YOU you would type Y then O and it would guess at this point that maybe you meant to type t TO, which if u did just press space and move on if not then press the U and there u go u got the word YOU. Though i think with voice over us blind users are so trained to find the right letter since we aren't going by sight but you may be surprised how it fixes your spelling errors for you. Once you get used to typing on it especially with touch typing you can actually get your typing speed up .. which i haven't yet as i have only had mine for a week lol
Okay so I've heard a lot about the iphone. So now I want to know how everyone thinks it compares with the android based phones? Are the androids better or worse than iphone? bout the same? Not much difference? Am debating between these 2 phones or just one with windows mobile with a quirty keyboard and touch screne. Let me know what you think.
currently as it stands the iPhone is the better choice overall from an accessible stand point. VoiceOver works with everything on the phone out of the box and alot of the 3rd party apps. Accessibility on Android isn't quite there yet its like using talks or mobile speak with a nokia or windows mobile based phone its works with alot of the phone built in apps and some 3rd party apps. I imagine this will only get better over time as android development continues though. Personally i prefer the non closed nature of android not having the restrictions of the app store like the iPhone has which means you can get apps from anywhere and install them on th phone.among other things. However if you aren't the most tech savy person and wants something with all of the power of android that has a simple polished user interface then the iPhone is the better bet. Financially the iPhone is the best deal in accesible mobile phones right now only reason not to get one is if u really don't think u can get used to a touch screen , whicch actually now that it supports bluetooth keyboards you can have your choices of keyboards to use with it, but if there is a particular application that it wont do or work with then yeah get something else.
I'd agree with this, with one exception: Unless I'm mistaken, the Android solution is nowhere near MobileSpeak and Talks: More like an LG phone, some stuff works and some does not, including the browser. As they said, the iPhone has full support for every app on it.
Thanks everyone for the info much appreciated.
the android phones aren't even to lg series abilities hardly. not to mention android phones have a touchscreen, which is waisted right now for the blind
I would like to add the moble speak 4.5 brings much emprovement t touch screens. Also let me clearify something, moble speak does support a windows moble phone's on board software. There are third part apps moble speak supports as well. I can use the messenger client on my phone just find. There are times I yhave to use the mouble speak cursor but that is not very much. Hope this helps someone in the future.
I will say i didn't mess with it much but i did try using a friends Motorola Droid briefly and it seems u really could do much via the touch screen you had to use the keyboard wit talk back on. Android accessibility improove with each update and they are pushing updates fairly frequently these days however i have heard that google plans to slow the frequency of th updates. The reason i compared Android to Talks/mobile speak on a nokia/windows mobile phone is that because it works with some third party apps while the lG and Samsung built in accessibility works only with a few features of the phone. and i do believe there are a handful of 3rd party apps and add ons for some of those LG phones. And to the above poster i will say that mobile speak has gotten alot better and does work with more of the phones built in software now than it did in the past, same for talks. but it still depends on the phone you have as well sometimes. The iPhone is stil the only phone that comes with a built in screen reader that cost you nothing other than your willingness to thro out all your pre conceived notions about using a touch screen and just force yourself to get used to one. Even though i was resistive to the iPhone my self till iOS4 came out with 99% of the features i wanted added in i still alway s reccomended it to the non tech savy user that just wanted something simple that workeds and is still as powerfull as you want it to be and you don't have to worry about how much extra its gonna cost u to make it talk.
For all my comments I will say this: I may consider getting an iPad for my Auxiliarist device as the Apple Products are, as we say, always ready. Never heard a Mac user, or an iPhone user, talk about their reader crashing. That will be important.
Now the price tag on the iPad is expensive so may have to go with an iPod Touch but the deal is the full-size keyboard is totally attractive, and so is the larger screen real estate. Looks like when I can spring for one I'll be getting it for sure.
Well assuming us blind readers don't need the screen real estate of something the size of an iPad, a touch with a bluetooth keyboard if you want a full sized keyboard would most likely do the trick