2015-01-21 VoiceOver App Smackdown
Seminars @ Hadley
Voiceover App Smackdown
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Ian Shadrick
Linn Sorge
Sue Melrose
Allen Maynard
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
January 21, 2015
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley Seminars team, and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is The Voiceover App Smackdown.
Our distinguished panel includes veteran Hadley instructors Douglas Walker, Ian Shadrick, Linn Sorge, and Sue Melrose. And we also have Alan Maynard, Access Technology specialist from Hadley’s computer services department. Today, they will be alternately laying the smackdown regarding their favorite voiceover apps. So I’m going to welcome our presenters, welcome everyone, and I’m going to turn the microphone over to Allen, who I believe is our first presenter and let’s get underway.
Allen Maynard
Hi, this is Allen. And the first app I want to talk about is called a KNFB reader, and some of you might recognize that. It is generally the same software that was available on the Nokia N82 cell phone a few years ago. But they’ve, the same company’s made it into an iPhone app now, and in my opinion, it’s one of the most accurate, well, for optical character recognition or OCR, you know, reading. And generally, the app, that’s what it is. You can snap a picture, and in a couple of seconds, it begins reading, and it’s incredibly accurate. There is a take picture button on the left side of the screen. It’s a pretty big button, and you double tap it and you snap the picture.
On the right—
Larry Muffett
Go ahead, Allen.
Allen Maynard
Sorry, Larry, I thought I was talking to myself there. Yeah, this is Allen, and the first app that I’m going to talk about is a KNFB reader, and most of you might recognize that as the general software that was available on the N82 cell phone a couple years ago. And it is the same company and they’ve converted the KNFB reader software into an iPhone app, and in my opinion, it’s one of the most accurate optical character recognition or OCR apps that’s available. As comparison to things like Prizmo.
On the left side of the display on the phone is the big button, it’s the take picture button. And on the right side of the display, is the field of view report button. Now that button, it snaps a picture of the document but it’s not really for character recognition. It’s checking the orientation of the document in comparison with the phone. For example, you’ll, it’ll snap the picture and then it might say top edge, right edges, visible, rotate it say 20 degrees clockwise. Now that means that your phone is not quite straight, so by saying 20 degrees clockwise, it means you want to turn the phone 20 degrees, let’s see, counterclockwise to get the phone as close to 0 degrees or as level as possible.
Now, the nice thing with this app is you don’t have to be perfect. In fact, they designed it so you didn’t have to be perfect. Although you do want to get that, that field report as close to a 0 as you can. You know, the closer you get to that, the more accurate your scan might be. Although, like I said, it doesn’t have to be super accurate. In fact, the document can be upside-down. It can still recognize the characters.
If you do a single finger swipe to the right once off the take a picture button, there’s the tilt guidance button, and that’s a nice feature that if that is on, the phone will vibrate until it’s exactly straight, you know. Straight up and down. You know, or parallel with the surface that your document is lying on, like the tabletop or whatever. And it’ll stop, you know, stop vibrating when it’s nice and straight. Now, you don’t have to have it on. It’s just an extra feature. When you get good with it, after lots of practice, you wouldn’t have to need to use it anymore.
This app can do bulk scanning or batch. Batch scanning. It’s really not designed for that, though. Even though the pictures can be, once you take a picture, it starts reading like within one to five seconds, it’s really not designed for doing a whole book. You know, it would take too long to snap every single page of the book.
Once you snap a picture, and it begins reading, you cannot right away snap another picture. What you have to do is, you need to do a single finger double tap on the back button, which is near the upper left corner of the display, and then you can, then you’ll find that take picture button again. And you can start snapping another picture. If you swipe with one finger to the right a couple of times, you’ll find a document type button, and that means you can set it to a single or a multi-column display. Although sometimes you may not know if what you’re scanning is a single column, like a single page, without any columns. Or it might be a table with multi-columns. But that’s what I was saying before. You don’t have to be totally accurate.
This app cannot do, let’s see, cannot recognize money, although I’ve heard that they might be working on that. It can also not do handwriting, or it cannot recognize handwriting. And it is, the cost of this app is $100, or well, $99, I guess, but in my opinion, it’s well worth it because it’s so much easier for me like to scan money just by sitting in my chair at home.
Okay. Now the next app is called Dark Sky. It’s a weather radar app, and the first thing you’ll find is the current conditions reported, so it might say for the current conditions I might say, a gentle rain or light rain and 16 degrees. Feels like 7. Something like that, which means just that. It’s light rain, and if there’s a windchill, if you go out, it’s 16 degrees Fahrenheit, it feels like 7, it probably means the windchill is maybe 9 degrees.
Let’s see. Now the, when it gives you the current conditions, it’s not up to the minute. It’s maybe within say 20 minutes, but it’s pretty accurate in what it’s telling you. If it’s saying it’s going to rain, you know, if it says it’s raining, you can pretty much be sure that within, at least within 20 minutes, if you go outside, it’ll probably be raining. If you do a single finger swipe to the right, there’s the, let’s see, you’ll find the next hour section and that tells you what will probably be happening within, you know, within the next hour. Could be, you might say, nearest precipitation or something like that. Talking about nearest precipitation. That’s pretty accurate, too. It might say something like, it’s heavy rain 10 miles to the southwest. It gives you an idea of what’s coming or what’s going away.
And if you double tap the current conditions area, you’ll get extra information such as the wind speed and direction, the dew point, the humidity, pressure and visibility, which can be interesting. Or especially with humidity, they don’t always tell you that on the radio. Now with this app, you do need the iOS version 7.0 or later. I think this app was free. But if I’m wrong, it was inexpensive, and the last one I’m going to talk about is the Lexicon app. It’s a dictionary app. Now it wasn’t designed specifically for blind use, but it is very accessible.
Let’s see. Okay, when you first run the app, you are put in just a standard search field, and you can either enter the word you want to look up using the keyboard, on-screen keyboard, or you can also do a, you can activate the dictation but with a two-finger double tap, you hear a beep, you speak the word, and then you do another two fingered double tap to turn off the dictation mode.
It doesn’t exactly tell you when there’s, if, you know, you can’t find the word that you want to look up, but you’ll know that it won’t, it hasn’t found it if, you know, no new text is spoken, nothing new on the screen. If you want to do another, if you want to do another, look up another word, there’s a clear text button. Finger swipe once to the right on the search field. Now if you, if the word is found, it’ll display the word and any, well, maybe not, but some phrases that that word appears in. For example, I did a search for the word giant and it found the word giant but also giant anteater, giant cockroach, et cetera.
So you can do a single finger swipe back and forth until you find the word or the phrase that you want to look up and you just do a single finger double tap. And it displays a little too much information, so what I suggest is you do a single finger swipe to the right until you find the, like where it says, you know, noun or verb, you know, the part of speech. Then you can do a two-finger swipe down and it’ll read from that point on down. So you can avoid most of that annoying stuff.
And if you want to do another search after you’ve [inaudible 0:11:09] a word, just like the KNFB reader, you have to do a single finger double tap on the search back button, which again, is near the upper left hand corner of the display. And now I’m going to turn it back to you, Larry. Thanks.
Larry Muffett
Thanks, Allen. That was interesting. I think our next presenter is Sue, so I’m going to turn the microphone over to Sue and she’s going to run her smackdown.
Sue Melrose
Okay. The first one I’m going to talk about is called Voice Dream Reader, and I believe this won the Golden Apple award from the Vis, AppleVis website this year. That’s what got me interested in it and then once I saw it, the thing that really sold me on it was the quality of the voices. The purpose of this application is to read books, magazines, articles, newspapers, web files of just about any text that you can bring in to it. The voices are totally awesome. They’re as humanlike as anything I’ve heard. It comes with 36 free voices, and then you can buy up to 100 other voices of various types. So you can go to the website and I’ll put that in the resource list so that you can actually test voices and see what you like.
The Dream Reader, it reads pretty much like any other of the general apps, the music and others. You double tap to play and pause and you two-finger swipe for rewind or fast-forward. You can read by word, sentence, chapter. You can back up by 15, 30, or 60-second intervals and again, by the other sentence and the words and the other segments that I just mentioned.
If you swipe, I believe it’s left and right, you change the speed and if you swipe up and down, you can change other settings. You can scroll through by percentage or by these other ones I just listed, sentence, paragraph, whatnot, so you can look through a document quickly. You can set bookmarks, you can write notes. The voices that you choose, like for example, I now have five voices, and if I set a voice to read a particular article, when I come back to that article, it not only remembers where I left off, it remembers which voice I chose, which speed, and all the other settings that I had. So it will continue.
The fun thing about this is that it also has a built, well, it uses Google translator, so if you have a French article you want to read, you can have it translated into English or vice versa. I think it translates something like 36 languages. Now Google Translate does charge a fee and so this app also charges a smaller fee in order to make up some of the difference. I think it’s 99 cents for every 8,000 words. So there’s a lot of features to this. You can load all kinds of files. PDF, zip, email attachments. Audio files, although I don’t know why, ‘cause you already have good audio.
But if you are a member of Bookshare, you can download straight from Bookshare, you can get ePub, the free public, or the ePublications on zip files, and they say the easiest way to load a file is actually through Dropbox, if you’re a member of Dropbox, but you can go straight to the web, as well, and download it. It has its own built-in browser or you can use your own browser. Whatever you decide. And another good feature of this is when you’re on a website, if you want to download an article off of it, it has what it calls a Smart Save, and it will try to just download the article and not all the links on the webpage. So that you get a pretty clean download most of the time.
Let’s see. So again, it truly was the voices, they’re just absolutely super voices, and they’re also, the flexibility, all the downloads that you can do with it. The cost of that application is about $10 and the voices range from 99 cents to $4.99. But remember, there’s also 36 free voices. Okay.
I’d also like to talk about a game that I play and I’ve been playing it for some time, and I really thought it was designed for the blind. It works so well. But it really wasn’t. I got on the website last night to read about the history of it, and it actually was designed for serious sighted gamers who were tired of only being able to play things like Candy Crush on their cell phones.
So this company, which is called Somethin’ Else, designed a game so that serious gamers could play on their cell phones the kinds of games they were used to. This game is kind of dark, although my daughter, who plays video games all the time, says nothing like what they play, but for me, it seemed dark. You’re entering caves of the dead and museums of memories and what you’re trying to do is bring yourself back from the dead. So the sound effects are absolutely wonderful. They’re just beautiful 3D sound effects. But unfortunately, you have to wear earphones in order to play the game. That’s its one drawback for a blind person. But because it’s all being done in dark environments, you have no, the sighted person has no advantage over you. So it’s all done by listening, by sounds, by using your cell phone.
You can play the game in one of three ways. You can either use your cell phone to move around in these environments and catch things and pick up things by tilting your phone various directions, and then shaking it, or you can choose where you use your hands to swipe the screen and tap the screen and do all those things. And in that case, your left foot is in the bottom left corner, your right foot’s in the bottom right corner, your left hand is in the top left and your right hand is in the top right, and it’s a very intuitive game. Easy to play and you can keep up with it pretty well.