For the person that was asking about verizon, not knowing if you're in an
area that is served by cox, comcast and or dish, here's some information to
consider, of which we've had both experience with cox and dish. Cox and
comcasts's accessibility is very good, because both companies use a x2 set
top box. The voice is pleasant. You have a 1 button direct access therefore
you can turn the voice on and off as needed. Since you don't have to relie
on a onscreen keyboard there's no problem or issue in turning to any channel
you want, just punch it up on the remote. With cox you can get all the
information you need this information about what I'm going to tell you about
the information that you could hear is based on a cox subscription, however
comcast should be close to the same. That is, when you press the information
when you're watching a show or you tune to a channel, it will tell you
information such as the name of the show, and how much time is left on the
show. It seems that it depends on the show, but for some shows it will give
you the show name and a brief description of the show. Dish is a very
simular experience, though the speech is kind of crummy, reminding us of
xp's narrator, but even worse. The male voice will give you that same
information such as the name of the show and a brief description of the
episode, and depending on the show the date of the episode. We ended up
quitting dish for 2 reasons, they could never get the tuner in the hopper to
work correctly. The second reason is that with the xm radio channels there
were random dropouts in the audio, lasting anywhere from 1 second to about 3
minutes, the average being about 5 to 10 seconds. After working on this with
them after 3 years, these issues were never resolved. This is what I
believe, they could have solved the problems but there was no interest on
their part to do so. If our cable wwasn't as good of an experience as it is
for us currently, we would have the cord completely cut because beleive me,
there's no shortage of alternative entertaiment options. Note, this is just
a thought for those of you, that are having disappointing accessiibility
issues, if you're provider offers a program card for tvo, it might be
something worth looking into. We don't know if all the tvo boxes are all
accessible but we do know of a few people that have certain models that are
good when it comes to accessibility. Now for the apps, the dish app, dish
anywhere app is an okay app. The sling app, we didn't like it. The sling
app you could get free if you have the hopper from dish, or you could buy
the sling tv stick and use the app. Using with the hopper we found it kind
of clunky and didn't always give the information you wanted out of it.
There's 2 cox apps, the cox connect app has access simular to the cox web
page about billing and other details, and the contore app is where you could
watch the tv channels, schedule recordings and other things, both these apps
are accessible.
Arlene and Wayne
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Matzura" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2018 5:43 AM
Subject: Re: FIOS TV
I've been a Fios customer since September, 2010. The accessibility
features in the current set-top boxes is relatively new--about two years
now, I think. On the whole, it's very accessible, just not 100% so.
Depending on which box you get, and there are at least two, possibly three
different ones, the position in the menu tree for turning accessibility on
differs, but the basic concept is the same. You have to press the remote's
MENU button, navigate to Settings, then to Accessibility,and the rest
should be intuitive when you get to that branch of the menu tree. In fact,
some boxes will tell you when you get to the accessibility option without
having to explicitly turn it on. I think this is one of the stupidest
things ever, since there is no documented way of getting to that option to
begin with, so what are you supposed to do, hunt around for it? So you'll
definitely need assistance to turn it on. Verizon can provide you that
assistance over the phone by looking up which box you have, and telling
you which buttons to pres. If you follow their directions to the letter,
it will work.
Now, what you get when you turn accessibility on isn't perfect. For
instance, the search option doesn't talk at all, but browsing the
electronic program guide, or EPG, does. None of the help screens speak.
Also, pressing the big round INFO button doesn't give details of what
you're watching, only the summary screen is spoken. That is, it speaks the
name of the show, season number, episode number and name, but no details,
such as plot, stars, etc. On the music channels, you only get to hear the
channel name, not the name of the playing track. On most music channels,
there is an on-screen scroll of information about either the currently
playing artist, or the channel's genre, which also is not voiced.
ON the whole, it's quite useful and usable, just not to the detailed level
some might want.
As for the phone or computer application, I also give that less than high
marks. Everything's there--descriptions, ability to browse and use the
EPG, direct channel tuning, all that--but the layout is anything but
optimal, and the on-screen keyboard for channel selection by number has a
horrid timeout problem, which means no matter how fast you are with a
phone and your phone's screen reader, you'll never be fast enough to type
more than two digits of a channel number before the software thinks you're
done and tunes your set-top box to that two-digit channel number. Example:
CoziTV is Fios channel 460. If I type 4, then 6, while I'm finding the 0
and pressing it, the timeout has already stopped taking input from the
on-screen keyboard, so my box gets set to channel 46. Another problem is
that the on-screen keyboard is sometimes overlaid with part of the rest of
the controls and options, so it's sometimes not possible to display the
whole keypad, making even attempting to select a channel by number most
difficult, if not altogether impossible. Of course, users that don't
require a screen reader can simply push the rest of the stuff out of the
way, revealing the full keyboard. I'm not sure whether a Bluetooth
keyboard would or could solve this problem, and to be fair, there may have
been updates to the application since last I tried it, which was probably
about four years ago, that may have solved this and other accessibility
problems.
Hope this helps.
On 10/16/2018 5:19 AM, Larry Smith wrote:
Is there anyone on this list using verizon FIOS TV set top box? If so, is
it accessible using the remote control? Also, can the set-top-box and TV
content be access using the mobile app? I currently have directv. I am
very unhappy with them! Thanks
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