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Google Introduces Voice Access To Make Android More Accommodating For People With Disabilities (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched a new beta app called Voice Access, which lets people control their Android phone with voice commands. The company took the wraps off Voice Access as an accessibility tool to help people who have difficulties using the touch interface, such as those with tremors or paralysis. Once installed, items in Settings and apps on the Homepage are numbered. The user can tell the device, "Go Home", which is transcribed at the top of the page, and then say, "Open one", to launch the app numbered one. Twitter and Facebook also recently took some steps to make some of their services more accessible to people.
The disability thing is just a cover. They want to make sure our computers are less annoying to any time travelers from the future.
How many people with tremors even use a phone... More because they are just so old they have some issues coping with new technology, unfortunately. This is really meant for the general userbase.
I guess I'm a time traveler as all of my Galaxy devices have had a voice activation feature to use the phone with voice commands.
Braille touchscreens
This is not nice for people who suffer from Tourette syndrome.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Doesn't appear to work that way. Homepage and settings only, numbered items only.
A shame, really. If it worked as you suggest, it would be considerably more useful. To everyone including the handicapped. And an inclusive, comprehensive solution is always a great deal better than an exclusive, restricted solution if both are practical -- as they are in this case.
But it's a start.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
... add support for audible feedback that did not require one to look at the screen, it would be useful for someone that was either blind, or that could not look at the screen for some other reason (perhaps someone driving?)
And to actually control functions in individual apps where it made sense, as well, such as music apps, maps/navigation, etc.. Some of that would require app developers to add hooks/definitions of the different functions.
"Ok google, open Pandora and select 'classic rock' station"
So many opportunities missed. Like for instance Google Now's location based reminders.
For example "Remind me the next time I am near the pharmacy to stop and get aspirin" - only works if you happen to be LOOKING at the screen as you drive by said pharmacy.
More likely, you'll get home, get out of the car, and only THEN look at the phone and see the reminder, when its too late.
It should ANNOUNCE, AUDIBLY something to actually REMIND you, like "(beep) You are near a pharmacy and asked for a reminder at this location"
It came as a great surprise to me when a friend who had become totally blind was using an iPhone. The smooth featureless surface seemed the last thing that would be useful to a blind person. But there is a whole subculture of apps for the blind for the iPhone, which, "surprise", were voice activated. He could use the phone to navigate the streets in his neighborhood when going for walks. He could order books for the blind over the phone, delivered to the phone, and listened to over the phone (using Bluetooth headphones). An amazing app is called "taptapsee", to identify objects. He just pointed the phone's camera at an object, double tapped the phone, and it spoke the name of the object!! Another app lets the blind person leave "notes" for himself. There are apps that will tell him what color an object is, using the camera of course. With one amazing app, he can point the phone at paper money, and it will tell him the denomination! I don't know if Android has all these capabilities, but why not? (A funny thing happened with my friend. His iPhone went completely blank, ie, the surface display refused to come up. This didn't bother him, but his wife couldn't see what was what. Turned out that it is a "feature" of an iPhone that if you triple-tap the surface, it will turn the surface display off! Took two trips to the Apple store to discover that one.) Bottom line, there are ten times as many apps for the blind for the iPhone than for the Android. (I counted 125 apps for the blind for the iPhone on one site, and could only find a dozen or so listed for the Android - a quick and non-scientific search :)). I seriously hope this will be the beginning of a surge so that Android can catch up. I am a very happy Android user, myself.
Just remember this: if there's no mandate for general accessibility, and accessible tools aren't widely available, it'll be a lot harder for you to kill yourself and get out of our way when you get old enough to develop tremors, lose your hearing, or lose your sight.
Just see this thread. People are asking for the font on Google Maps for Android to be scalable. That would go a long way to help people with poor vision to use one of Google's main Android apps.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
As if they had a choice. There are widespread accessibility changes coming on all platforms of devices from government mandates that have to be done by the end of the year. All tv set top boxes have to have text to speech and magnification coming (as long as they are fairly recent boxes), along with phones/tablets. Good on google for getting there ahead of time and spinning it properly
Apple makes it really easy to support Guided Access in apps, basically by assigning a meaningful string to every UI element so someone can navigate an entire touch UI just by listening to what is on the screen as you list and move between active control elements.
Not every app is as good as it could be about supporting this, but even doing nothing at all the iPhone uses labels on buttons and text areas to describe what is going on with the UI. So really it's many more apps that are at least usable to the blind.
On a side note the Apple Watch is also a useful tool for the blind, as when using Maps to get directions you get coded taps on your wrist telling you to turn left, right, or to stop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As a person with a disability acquired in adulthood, let me give you a little insight into my life. I lost my career as a programmer. I lost my ability to write. I lost my ability to communicate by email, instant messenger, IRC etc. I lost my ability to use Web services, commercial or governmental. I lost my ability to participate in the educational system. Yes I can read, I can turn the pages of a book but I can't fill in web forms, take online exams, or even write legibly enough for exams on paper. In other words, I lost my ability to participate in society. My perceived value is near zero even though my brain still works, I still have all the skills I had as a programmer/analyst, I just can't use my hands to express it. And according to your logic, there's no way a company could justify the expense of a personal assistant to transcribe what I say into something the company can use. They could just hire a person whose body works right. Many disabled people are quite competent cognitively, treating disabled folks this way is a pretty huge waste of human capital. Fortunately, with speech recognition I regained my ability to write and some programming but most GUI interfaces including web forms are still out of reach. For what it's worth, I acquired my disability as a result of programming. From what I've been able to determine, my disability hits about 30,000 to 40,000 developers a year. To be honest, the numbers are fuzzy because many red states have declared this kind of disability a nonreportable workplace injury and is not covered by Worker's Comp. Personally, I don't want you to build an accessibility interface. I want you to give me an API so I can write my own interface. The reason is simple. Given that most technologists royally fark up a GUI for ordinary people, there's no chance in heaven or earth that you will make an accessibility interface that's useful. An accessibility interface requires specialized knowledge because it is not just a replacement if your hands or your eyes, it's a whole different way of using an application and if you are not living the life of a crip, the chances of you understanding what the interface should be like is vanishingly small.
I want you to give me an API so I can write my own interface.
I wonder if something like Microsoft's AI Bot API may eventually be able to do the sort of things you're perhaps thinking of. Granted, probably not on a mobile device yet, but I think this idea may have long-term potential for accessibility. Chat programs are becoming almost a platform unto themselves, so if this can leverage some of those capabilities with customized, programmable bots to help perform tasks by voice command, I could see it being quite handy for allowing very deep customization of voice command systems - at least in theory.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I believe you are right about bots. Now I need to create one that understands code features, templates, and emacs.
I assume you've seen this before, but if not, you might be interested: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/99-professional/6263-code-by-voice-faster-than-keyboard.html
How does the system prevent control from someone else that the legitimate user?