Hi My experience, however, was not so bad. I picked up the TOI app first, in IOS 5 a few months back. The accessibility was far better. Later on I upgraded to IOS 6 and updated the app. Accessibility thereafter dropped considerably.
However it was usable. I have not used for a some time now. I am presently using the same app on Android. Unfortunately I am running ICS on Android and its general accessibility with Talkback is not very great. Using this app with keyboard is extremely good on Android. Getting news is no problem. There may be some options which not be accessible. I will only know it once I get it checked up by a sighted person. I am enjoying reading the newspaper this way. Harish. -----Original Message----- From: AccessIndia [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: 07 August 2013 10:51 To: [email protected] Subject: [AI] Ipad edition of the Times of India (TOI) app - Where is accessibility? App a Month - A new Blog Series by Barrierbreak to talk about Mobile App Accessibility. Here's the first one Experience shared by Bhavesh who is blind and is currently an employee of BarrierBreak. Bhavesh chose to review the iPad edition of the Times of India (TOI) app to know whether the app can be accessed by people with disabilities. Why did I choose to review the TOI app? As a blind person, I can listen to the news on the various FM news channels. But how about reading the news on a device on the go? I spend almost 30 minutes daily in traveling and since it's not possible for me to read from a newspaper, I would prefer to get access to news with a device that can read out the news for me. Let's assume that there is an app which allows the user to access the news items, including audio/video content. But what if such contents are not accessible for persons with disabilities? My experience with the TOI app I used Voiceover screen reader to test the app on the iPad. Voiceover is a screen reader built into Apple's OSX and iOS operating systems. By using Voiceover, the user can access their Macintosh or iOS device based on spoken descriptions. As I went through the app, I noticed that they have provided the option to view the app with different font size for low vision users. However, the option (Button) provided to get to font size is unlabeled. The Voiceover simply announced it as "Button". That's not all! Majority of the textual buttons and image buttons lack textual description. The textual buttons are announced as "button", whereas the image buttons are announced with the image name e.g., "Home btn button", "City btn button" etc throughout the app. Headings help a screen reader user to navigate through different sections of the app. Many screens of the app lacked headings. I wanted to read something from the cricket section. But guess what? When I opened the Cricket section and went through the article list, all the articles were announced as buttons, instead of the title of the article that I had expected to hear. This made me very frustrated. I opened an article by guess work and landed at the bottom of the page of that article. I had to go to the top of the page, read the entire page and find the article. While reading the article, I noticed that many informative images had the absence of alternative text. Alternate text provides the information conveyed through images to the users in the form of text. Alternate text is helpful for users with visual disabilities, learning disabilities, users browsing with text browsers etc to understand the information conveyed using images. Next I decided to give a shot at accessing the videos. I selected a video from the videos screen and that video started playing automatically. Moreover there was no option to stop the video content at the beginning of the video page. Fortunately Voiceover suppresses any audio playing in the background. By far, I feel that the app is completely inaccessible for people with disabilities. Now imagine the plight of a person for whom reading is the only way to access the news, such a person who is deaf-blind? How would they be able to read the news? Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list.. Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
