Apple Makes Right Call
With Accessible iPhone

By Deborah Kendrick

The first person I knew to own a cell phone was another blind guy. It was 1992. The phone was larger than a contemporary cordless phone and very expensive.

Many people with a variety of disabilities were quick to follow his lead, starting a trend. With a cell phone, you could call a cab or call for help from anywhere. You didn’t need to wend your way through unfamiliar parking lots or corridors or into a building with no access for wheelchairs. Before long, however, cell phones weren’t just for making telephone calls, and people who couldn’t see the screen were no longer able to follow the trends, let alone set them.

It wasn’t a matter of ability, just accessibility. A blind person could figure out how to send a text, for example, (press the number 2 twice for the letter b, the number 4 twice for the letter I, right?) But if you couldn’t see the letters on the screen to confirm what you had typed – or have a clue what the responding message was that beeped in on your phone seconds later – what was the point?

Third-party vendors scrambled to close the gap. For $300, you could buy a piece of software to put on certain phones carried by certain cell phone providers that would convert what was in the menus and on the screen to synthesized speech.

A few phones, namely the LG phones available through Verizon, came from the manufacturer and had the ability to speak certain menus. I had three or four of these phones myself over a decade or so. Pressing certain buttons on the phone, I could hear such things spoken as the time, battery strength, signal availability and information from my “contacts” list. These phones were what I dubbed “half accessible.” The availability of speech for the menus went only so far, usually into second-level menus, but never third. In other words, I could pay the same $200 for a phone that anyone else in the phone store paid, but I could only access half of its features.

As smartphones became increasingly popular, the gap widened. While sighted colleagues could check email, consult calendars and perform myriad other tasks akin to magic with their hand-held devices, the typical blind or visually impaired person could still only make phone calls. In fact, with many phones boasting touch screens – a single flat surface with no buttons discernible by touch – it was often not possible to do even that.

In the summer of 2009, Apple Inc. released the first iPhone with VoiceOver and unleashed a marketing phenomenon that continues to spread like the proverbial wildfire. What was completely unprecedented with this new product was that a blind person could pay the same price for the same phone and, even though it had only a touch screen with no buttons to feel, use it “right out of the box” as well as anyone who could see the screen. To date, it is estimated that 100,000 blind or visually impaired customers have purchased iPhones, and that number is growing daily.

How does it work?

Unlike other commercial products with touch screens, all iPhones are made equal. After taking mine out of the box, I needed a sighted person to spend about 30 seconds with the phone to turn VoiceOver on for me. To do that, one must go to the home screen and tap “settings.” Then, tap “general,” followed by “accessibility” and then “VoiceOver.” Voila! Everything that can be seen with the eyes on the phone can now be heard with the ears. (Alternatively, for the person with low vision, a program called Zoom can be opened from “accessibility,” which will instead magnify everything on the screen, affording a person with limited vision complete access.)

With VoiceOver enabled, you simply slide your finger around the screen to hear the icons spoken. A collection of gestures – double-tapping with one, two or three fingers, swiping left, right, up or down and several others – makes performing all operations possible. With my iPhone, and no special software or hardware, I can set alarms, check what time it is anywhere in the world, read email, search the Internet, download audio books, listen to my favorite NPR station and make voice recordings. I can enter appointments into my calendar, write myself notes, listen to my music collection and perform what seems like a million other tasks.

The novelty here, in large part, is not that I, as a blind person, can do these things, but that I can do them with the exact same product as anyone else.

And then there are the apps!

Any iPhone user will tell you that part of the fun – and utility – of using an iPhone is downloading the myriad apps (applications) available. Although not all apps are accessible to blind users, many are. Of greater interest, perhaps, are the many apps that have been written specifically with blind people in mind.

The first app I downloaded to my iPhone was a money reader. By simply opening the app and holding my phone’s camera lens near a piece of currency, I can quickly determine if the bill in question is $1 or $20. The next app I downloaded is called Light Detector. Sounds silly, maybe, but by opening it when I was the first to arrive at a meeting recently, I discovered that the room in which I waited was dark – a definite clue that I was in the wrong place. (This simple app emits a high tone for the presence of light and a low tone if an area is dark.)

There are apps that will identify colors, apps that will identify print, and apps that will identify objects. The latter, called oMoby, is sometimes more entertaining than useful, but its database of objects is constantly growing. When I snapped a picture of a bottle of wine, for instance, it first told me that it was a bottle of wine! Trying the other side, the app told me it was Pinot grigio!

Whether Apple Inc. took this giant step forward into the land of accessibility because it was the right thing to do or because it was profitable is anybody’s guess. Clearly, the result is that it is both. Meanwhile, the company’s other products are following suit; the iPod Touch and iPad also have VoiceOver, although the jury is still out regarding the complete accessibility of the latter.

Meanwhile, for any newcomer who is blind to the iPhone environment, there is an abundance of help getting started. Web sites, podcasts and tutorials are appearing almost as rapidly as the iPhones themselves.

Here are three good places to get started: 1) a book: “Getting Started with the iPhone: An Introduction for Blind Users” by Anna Dresner and Dean Martineau is available in hard-copy Braille, CD or download from the National Braille Press (www.nbp.org); 2) a website: www.applevis.com was established by blind users to provide information about the iPhone, iPod or iPod Touch; 3) podcasts: www.allwithmyiphone.com is a website that features a series of podcasts that provide audio tours of iPhone apps by a blind user.

Deborah Kendrick is a newspaper columnist, editor and poet. She is currently working on a biography of Dr. Abraham Nemeth. She can be reached at Kendrick.deborah@gmail.com.