Vet Ruben Morales’ iPhone is just like any other, but he uses a screen-reading software called VoiceOver, which lets him access all the mobile device’s features.
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Ruben Morales, a blind, 59-year-old retired engineer who lives in
this Silicon Valley city, has used a specialized screen-reading program
for years to write and run spreadsheets on his desktop computer.
But recently, he figuratively cut the cord to his desktop and joined the mobile revolution. Morales was visiting an area Veterans Affairs blind rehabilitation center, learning how to use an iPhone’s features for vision-impaired people.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Morales said, demonstrating how he can call up a song and play it with a few taps.
“Whatever I can do on the computer I can basically do it on the iPhone. It has the same capability.”
The smartphone, a gadget designed for the sighted, has turned out to be a godsend for the blind and visually impaired, making them more independent than ever before.
With VoiceOver, the iPhone’s built-in gesture-based app that reads text on a touch-screen aloud, or Google Android’s TalkBack, blind users can access anything on their phones. The user activates apps with a few gestures – single finger to explore and find buttons, one-finger touch to identify things on the screen, and double-tap to push the button after it’s located.
“It’s a learning curve, but you can learn to do every single thing on an iPhone that anyone else can do,” said Lee Huffman, editor of AccessWorld, published by the American Foundation for the Blind. “These devices are opening up a whole new world.”
It didn’t look like it would turn out that way at first.
“The blind community started getting really panicky” when smartphones and later, tablets, took off following the iPhone’s debut in 2007, researcher Joshua Miele, associate director of Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, recalled. “Touch-screens were a real concern.”
But in 2009, Apple included VoiceOver in its mobile operating system, and followed up with the personal assistant Siri in 2011, launching a new world of mobility for the visually impaired. Google added TalkBack, a screen reader, to its Android operating system in 2009 and Google Now, a personal assistant, in 2012. Microsoft mobile has similar features.
“It’s made a huge difference, productivity-wise,” said Jennison Asuncion, accessibility leader at LinkedIn, who is blind. “I use my mobile phone probably even more than lot of people.”
Erin Lauridsen, 32, a trainer at the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco, has been blind since birth and grew up using expensive, clunky, single-purpose devices for doing course work in school.
“When the iPhone 3GS came out with VoiceOver built in, it was a huge game-changer for me and a lot of other people,” she said.
She uses an app called BlindSquare for navigation; Money Reader to identify currency denominations; and Voice Dream Reader to assemble audio playlists of documents from many sources. She also uses Uber and a lot of other popular apps.
“I’m on an equal footing with what everyone else does – the Yelping, Facebooking and Twittering,” she said.
Source : Herald Online , 16th Sep 2015
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