Analysis

Why not make the iPhone more Accessible?

Peter Abrahams By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research
Published: 15th August 2008
Copyright Bloor Research © 2008
 Logo for Bloor Research

The iPhone is the must-have technology of the moment—unless you are unable to use it. A user must be able:

  • To see fairly well, not 20-20 vision but something close. If the user is blind they cannot see the controls on the screen and therefore cannot control the device. If the user has a vision impairment the controls may not be sufficiently clear and again the device is of no use.
  • Hold the device steady with one hand whilst controlling it with the fingertips of the other. Whilst ruling out its use by a tetraplegic user it also appears to rule out ladies with long nails (the nails get in the way of the fingertips and trying to control the device with the pads of fingers or nails does not seem to work well if at all).

If you search for 'iphone accessibility' on the apple site you will find a list of standard features that can make the iPhone more accessible. It is a useful list but leaves a significant number of holes.

It might be argued that the iPhone is a very visual device so a blind user would not want to use it. This is wrong because there are a large number of features that will appeal to blind users that are not available on other devices. These include the excellent integration with diary and address book on the the Mac, integration of the iPod function into the phone, functions relating to GPS (a friend of mine puts a to-do on his iPhone to shop at a particular supermarket and when he is in the vicinity it automatically reminds him).

So the question becomes how could the iPhone be made more accessible without a complete redesign?

My suggested answers are based around the other input and output facilities of the iPhone: sound input, sound output, the movement sensor and the vibrator, as well as suggestions for alternative pointing devices and grips.

The iPhone uses a capacitive touchscreen which recognises the capacitance of a bare fingertip, it does not recognise a fingernail or a plastic stylus because they do not conduct electricity well. It is possible to design stylus pointer devices that do have a capacitance and would be recognised. The simplest would be a metal stylus held in the hand but some general purpose device that works independently of bare fingers might be more useful. This device could be used with a prosthetic hand, at the end of a pointer held in the mouth or a variety of other similar devices. It could also prove useful to the apparently able-bodied users who cannot use bare fingertips, including the lady with long nails but also workers in cold or dangerous situations that have to wear gloves. In fact there are third parties who sell such devices but they are not mentioned in the Apple documentation.

The typical way to use the iPhone is to hold it in one hand and control it with the fingers of the other. Some people do not have two hands and others need to use one hand for something else so a variety of stands, straps, clips and grips should be available. Again these are available from third parties but not marketed as accessibility aids.

The iPhone has superb sound quality which could be used for a screen reader but at present is not. Such a function would make the iPhone accessible to a large number of people with vision impairments. People who can see well enough to identify the buttons on the screen, but not well enough to read the text, would benefit from a screen reader that read out the area being pointed at and then activated it if pressed again. The Mac operating system, OS X Leopard, has the VoiceOver technology so Apple have the basis for developing a iPhone VoiceOver.

If the user cannot see the screen at all then VoiceOver will not be sufficient and they will need another method to control the device. Voice recognition is the most obvious possibility, again Mac already has Speech Command so building them into the iPhone should not be difficult.

Another possible input that is unique to the iPhone is the motion sensor. Any motion of the device can be detected; the standard phone will pick a landscape or portrait presentation depending on how the device is being held. There are games that use this to control an on-screen car. My thought is that it could be used to move the focus—for example tilt up, down, left and right could be the equivalent of cursor keys, whilst rotate right and back would be the equivalent of enter.

The vibrate feature can obviously be used for warnings as it is at the moment. It could also be used to give information, for example in conjunction with GPS and the motion sensor the user could rotate the device until it strongly vibrates then walk in that direction.

Whenever I look at devices or features designed to help people with disabilities my next thought is how could this also help a larger population. The obvious population in this case is car drivers where hand and eye free control is becoming a must and voice output of SMS is becoming the norm.

It would seem to me that:

  • Apple should do more to provide basic accessibility for the iPhone.
  • Specialists in specific disabilities should provide further functionality via the Apple App Store.
  • Information about all the accessibility features from Apple and third parties should be available in one place.

If you have devleoped an app or add on device that could make the iPhone more accessible, or even if you just have an idea for one, please add your comments to this article.

Reader Comments

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15th August 2008: 'Tony Crooks' said:

Peter Abrahams should concentrate on accessibility with mobile phones in general rather than pick a specific model. Mobile phones are incredibly weak except for a very few models. But the iphone has one thing over most mobiles in that if you manually dial a number the buttons are rather large, aren't they?

Get a life, Peter!

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15th August 2008: 'Jim Haynes' said:

ispeak!!!!!!!!

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15th August 2008: 'Big Man' said:

I totally agree with the points made in this article. However Apple could make a great contribution to the sight impaired community if the company would even make all of their apps on a desktop or a laptop computer completely accessible. The iTunes store is a goldmine of varied types of content. Sight impaired individuals could really take advantage of this source of content. But the problem is that iTunes (the program) is almost inaccessible in turn making the store almost totally inaccessible.

Apple's OS has great accessibility APIs built in. Furthermore Apple encourages other software publishers to make their apps accessible. But many of Apple's main line apps have very little if any accessibility. This certainly is a case where Apple should eat its own dog food. Ultimately I think it would taste pretty good.

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20th August 2008: 'Ricky Buchanan' said:

"Big Man", you really should get your facts straight about iTunes. Virtually all parts of iTunes and the iTunes Store are accessible to Mac users, and have been since early in 2007!

Podcasts can be subscribed to and downloaded, music and movies/etc. can be purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store, and all the other functions. There are still a few things which need sighted assistance (I believe the most annoying is initialising a new iTunes Store account), but they are very few and the number keeps shrinking as Apple update Leopard and iTunes itself.

I totally agree that Apple should make all its iLife and iWork applications accessible to the greatest extent possible and that's something they haven't managed yet - but please, at least bag them for stuff that's factually true!

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20th August 2008: 'Big Man' said:

I am sitting with my blind friend. He has used many screen readers both on OS 9, OS X and XP. He has been a beta tester for Voice Over. I'm watching him try to interact with the iTunes Store. He can bring up iTunes, get into the sidebar and select the iTunes store. Then he can move to the main iTunes store window. But at that point he can find no way to interact with that window. If you know how to do it, without sighted help he'd sure like to know how.

Another example, he would like to buy the movie "Inherit the Wind. He can use the search function to find the movie. But many of the fields in the search results to not give any useful information. If he assumes he knows were he is, and clicks on view movie, it brings up a whole page regarding the movie, including the buy or rent buttons. But yet again he cannot interact with the page.

If he wants to look at the status of his account he can get to the page with his account information but when he tries to interact with the window, all Voice Over says is "dimmed image" and will not do anything further.

He can never interact with the main window at the iTunes Store.

His computer is running 10.5.4 with all current updates, he's running iTunes 7.7.1.

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28th August 2008: 'Ricky Buchanan' said:

My apologies, Big Man. It seems there is a specific VoiceOver related meaning to "Main iTunes Story Window" that I didn't understand. I am not personally a VoiceOver user - although I am a disabled Mac user - so I queried the MacVisionaries mailing list about the topic. The archives are publically available so you can read the myriad replies if you please - my initial message is "iTunes Accessibility - have I been mistaken?" and the followup messages are linked from that page also.

It appears that my initial statement that "virtually all parts of iTunes and the iTunes Store are accessible to Mac users" was correct, but it's also correct that the specific functions you pointed out are part of what's not accessible.

I apologise for speaking about something when I didn't have all the facts to back it up. After I extract both feet from my mouth, I'll keep researching and learning and hopefully I'll do a better job next time :).

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28th August 2008: 'Ravager' said:

I love it how when one searches for specific Apple/vision impairment support, there is always at least one "iTunes isn't accessible" post, even if the beginning thread/post/whatever has nothing to do with anything iTunes. Aside from that, there are other ways to make the iPhone accessible (that I can think of) that are either not stated here, or based off of what has been said. What about taking it, instaling Voice Over and using a bluetooth keypad with bluetooth headset? Bluetooth is huuuuge right now, and seems to be growing larger and larger. That could serve a couple of purposes. One wouldn't necessarily have to even take the phone out to type on it. There would be no need for skin to device contact. And with that, one could also use it without needing to take their eyes off of other *somewhat* important things (like the road for example). If Ford can take their cars and install Sync for bluetooth supported phones (giving voice recognition to phones that might not even have it), why not take the same tech for the iPhone.

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29th August 2008: 'Big Man' said:

And while they are at it, how about an accessible iPod? The iPod has everything necessary to make it fully accessible to the blind, except a bit of text to speech code. RockBox is an alternate OS that kind of approaches the problem, but why can't Apple handle this sort of thing? Seems like a no brainer to me.

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30th August 2008: 'Ravager' said:

Ahhh, rockbox. What a great product, as long as yu dont have a sixth gen iPod. I am a user of rocbox and it is actually great. The only thing is I don't see Apple giving the okay to third party apps to take it to that level. If you know anything about it, it is not usable on later gen iPods because of the new security that Apple has installed on the iPods just for that purpose, to keep third party apps off of it. Like I said, a version of Voice Over and possibly bluetooth keyboard. If Windows biggest screen reader (Freedom Scientific's JAWS for Windows) can be used on certain gadgets running Pocket Windows, is it really all that hard for Apple to do the same? I mean they do have a good screen reader right out of the box. No other software to be bought, no third party screen readers to try to get running. Hell, it evenworks for the first boot/registration process and (believe it or not) if you decide that you need to install OSX (I have needed to install my own OS more than once on an apple and have absolutely no usable vision, and was greatful to see that VO talked to me through install).

Apple has proven in the (even though recent) past that they can do this and make it work. They are continuesly proving that they can make it work better and better for new versions of the OSs. Just "dumb" it down a little (or spice it up, I don't know) and there you go. Is the software/OS for the iPhone that intense that a screen reader for a computer couldn't handle it? I have absolutely no experience with that phone, so I have absolutely no clue how intense the OS is.

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