Tag Archives: screen reader

Mobile Accessibility Review

Posted on May 28, 2011

I’ve had my new Android phone for a couple of weeks now, and I’m finally starting to get comfortable with it.  I have to give credit where it is due.  Without Mobile Accessibility, it would be a lot tougher to use the phone, though certainly not impossible.  However, there are a few shortcomings in the app suite/screen reader that surprised me.

First, let me step back and explain what Mobile Accessibility is.  Code factory has developed a home-screen replacement which contains alternative versions of the major functions most people want to perform with their phones.  If you stay within the application, all of the functions are accessible without resort to the phone’s hardware navigation keys.  This is not so if you leave the app.  This is a limitation of Android.  Mobile Accessibility functions as a screen reader while working with the phone’s native interface or other applications.  Accessibility is hit and miss here, but again that is a problem with the platform.  Android provides an accessibility API, but as I understand it the developer is responsible for pushing content to it rather than the screen reader being able to extract the necessary information from the control.  If that is an accurate description of the problem, I’m surprised that there are as many accessible applications as there are.  See my post from a couple of weeks ago for some helpful links.  What I will do here is talk through the built in functions and offer a few comments about the screen reader functionality of the phone.  Doubtless over time I may learn some things that modify my first impressions.  I’ll try to remember to revise or update accordingly.

Navigation

Within Mobile Accessibility, everything can be done by touch.  You can explore the screen with your finger and double-tap what you want, or you can swipe up and down to move between elements.  Swiping left and right jumps several elements at a time unless you are within an edit control, in which case the app speaks according to the navigation setting.  Triple tapping or using the menu button brings up general and specific settings to where you are, including the ability to change the navigation mode between words, characters, and sentences.  Also hidden in this menu are options to check the status of your phone, get the date and time, and see system notifications.  I would like to see some of these accessible more quickly, perhaps with multi-touch gestures.  The system notification screen is direct from the phone, so hardware navigation is required.  It seems to me this could easily be integrated.  If your phone is multi-touch capable, two-fingered actions move you to top and bottom or back to the previous screen.  Reading the manual is helpful, especially if this is your first experience with touch screen access.  It didn’t occur to me to try two-fingered gestures until I read it.

Input

If you are buying a new phone and know you need hardware navigation, chances are you will have a slide-out keyboard.  This is a superior method of text entry, since it is faster to find and press physical keys.  however, if you have a phone without a physical keyboard or for some reason don’t want to use it, Mobile Accessibility provides a virtual keyboard that works well.  You can move around to hear the letter that will be typed and lift your finger to enter it.  There is also a mode that makes the place where you rest your finger always be H.  From there you can move to where you would expect the other keys to be.  I haven’t tried this.  I do occasionally use the virtual keyboard for quick corrections even though I have a slide-out.  The Mobile Accessibility keyboard is selectable outside of the app for use as an input method for other applications.

You can also use voice input to enter text.  Mobile Accessibility integrates with Android’s (2.2 and up) voice recognition feature, which works through Google.  This takes some getting used to, but as I learn how to use it efficiently I am really getting to like it.  If you are in a quiet environment where you can use it, you’ll put keyboarding to shame.  And by the way, you can’t do this with an iPhone.  Holding down the volume-down key and waiting for two short vibrations, you speak short phrases into the phone.  It comes back with a menu of possible choices for what you said.  You can move between them with swipes and use the volume-up key to go word by word.  That little tidbit from the manual proved very helpful to be sure I entered what I thought.  Double-tapping is supposed to select the option, but I had trouble with that.  pressing volume-down also selects the current entry and I found that more reliable.  The hardware navigation keys and Enter also work.  You can use this feature outside of the application, though you get to it differently.  I have not tried this.

The Phone as a Phone

You’re carrying around a little computer that runs circles around the desktop computer you may have used just a few years ago, but it still has to actually make and receive phone calls.  At the top of Mobile accessibility’s home screen is the phone function.  when you open it, you are presented with options to call by number or call by contact.  The call log is also displayed, and you can double-tap any of the entries for a list of things you can do with it, including call, send SMS, etc.  Choosing to dial by number brings up a telephone keypad that works like the virtual keyboard.  Things break down once you have a call going.  One of the first things I had to do when I got my phone was set up voice mail.  Even though I used the settings screen to initiate the call, Mobile Accessibility’s call screen presents once the call is connected.  all one can do from this screen is long swipe up or down to answer or disconnect a call.  Yes, you can double-tap while the phone is ringing to hear who is calling.  There is also an option to use volume keys to answer or end the call.  The proximity sensor is used to allow the buttons to actually control call volume if the phone is next to your ear.  Now here’s the problem.  Voicemail wanted me to enter numbers.  How am I supposed to do that?  The hardware numbers on my keyboard didn’t work.  I finally discovered that I could get the phone’s default number pad to come up by finding the right spot on the bottom of the touch screen, but that keypad has no accessibility.  Getting it close enough to my face to see what I was doing caused the screen to go blank.  I got it done, but the accessible phone pad needs to be integrated into the in-call functionality.  I do not know if Android or my particular phone model could be the problem here.  I do recognize the potential for issues with the program speaking over the call, but having it inaccessible is worse.  That said, making and receiving calls is usually no problem.  When you are calling by contact there is a search box at the top that you can use to track down the contact you want.  I have not had much luck with Google’s voice recognition on this screen, but it is there.

Contacts

Contacts and calendar data are pulled from the phone’s stock databases, so you can sync with Google and they’ll appear within Mobile Accessibility.  You can maintain contacts as you would expect.  My only complaint here is that there is no option to sort by last name, which I prefer.

SMS (Text Messaging)

Again, this works like you would expect it to.  You can find a contact or enter a number.  your previous conversations are shown in the log and each is grouped by contact.  While you are in a conversation the incoming message is read.  I have used the voice input function here, but I’m a little afraid that I might miss something really bad due to not understanding what was actually presented to me as a choice.  Once a text is sent you can’t get it back.  At least once some of the suggestions it brought back for what I said would have been quite embarrassing if I had accidentally chosen one of them.  Review carefully.  I feel better about using it now that I know how to go word by word before making a selection.  It’s still faster than keyboarding.

Alarms

This is a handy feature.  You can set multiple alarms identified by name and have them be recurring.  I have one set for Thursday mornings at 10:45 to remind me to contain the dog before the lady who cleans our pool arrives.  They don’t get along.

Calendar

The calendar is disappointing.  What good is a calendar without reminders.  I can’t find a way to set reminders on new appointments.  Though the stock calendar app is not accessible, based on the settings I’m pretty sure it has reminders.  I’ll have to wait until one of my saved appointments comes up to verify whether they work.  Not only that, the dates differ from what’s in my Google calendar.  I’m pretty sure this isn’t a problem with the program I’m using to sync up my Outlook calendar with Google, since Google and Outlook remain correct.  I’m unable to see if the stock calendar app on the phone is also wrong.  This may or may not be a problem within Mobile Accessibility.

Email

The email function only accepts your Gmail account.  I’m not sure why the app can’t leverage the Gmail account that the phone is set up with rather than making you re-enter this information in its settings, but once that is done it works very well.  I would like to see an option to only check email when the email function is accessed.  That would save data charges and battery if you don’t really need to know that you have email waiting.  Unless something about Android prevents it a better option would be to rely on the built-in Gmail functionality for all of that.

Web

To my knowledge,this is the best accessible web browser available.  Given that other Mobile Accessibility features are hooked to outside functions of the phone, I’m disappointed that the web browser does not appear to be one of them.  If you are using an external application such as Facebook and want to go into a web site, the system’s default browser comes up.  If you install the Ideal web browser you can get limited screen reading functions, but you are never offered the option of using Mobile accessibility.  I really hope this changes in the next version, or maybe there’s a trick I don’t know to make it happen.  Within the browser, there are lots of navigation and reading options that can be found by bringing up the menu once the browser has started.  I have not used this much yet, because the place I usually go on the web, Facebook, doesn’t work well.  I don’t know where the problem is, but the whole page for the Facebook mobile site doesn’t load.  I know that Facebook tries to optimize it’s presentation based on the phone model, so it could be there is a bug on their side.  Whoever is at fault, the result is that I cannot see anything but the first few updates on Facebook from the mobile site and thus it is of little use.  I have better results using the Facebook Android app, though it has its own accessibility issues.

Where Am I

Where Am I uses your GPS receiver to announce your current location.  It can periodically report your location as you travel.  I found this function to be of little value.  As often as it reported correct addresses as I walked down a major street in my neighborhood, it also reported addresses from streets in the general vicinity.  The accuracy was way off.  I realize that is a function of the GPS receiver, but during the same walk I also experimented with Google Maps.  Using the navigation function through Google Maps accurately reported where I should turn based on my location, so I’m not sure why Where Am I was so bad on that first trip.  It seemed to work better the next time I tried it, using it in conjunction with navigation to give me clues along the way as to my location.  It would be a much more useful app if it could identify cross streets as I approached them and get nearby business information from Google.  Perhaps they plan an enhanced pay navigation app for the future.  After all, their $800 Mobile Geo product cash cow is dead or fading fast.

Apps

Mobile Accessibility provides a menu by which you can get to other installed applications on your phone.  You can use standard navigation functions to move through the menu or press a letter on your physical keyboard to jump to the first app that starts with that letter.  Once you select an app, you’re on your own.  That takes you out of Mobile Accessibility, so you’ll need the navigation controls on your phone and the good grace of the developer to use the app.

Settings

Mobile Accessibility gives you access to some basic features of your phone such as ringer type and vibration through this menu as well as settings for the app itself.  For full access to your phone’s features, you’ll want to use the Settings App that came with the phone.

Overall

There are a few other things On my  wish list and not yet mentioned here.  I’d like to have quicker access to connectivity features such as bluetooth, 4G, and wi-fi.  I’d also like to have a way to quickly turn on or off the GPS radio, since it quickly drains the battery.  I suspect there are apps that can help with this.  At least some of these are generally readily accessible on a phone’s stock home page, but Mobile Accessibility replaces the home page, so it needs to fill that gap.

This is a great first effort.  It may sound like I’m not very happy, but I’m delighted to have gone out and purchased a phone that was basically useable out of the store.  The iPhone still has Android beat for off-the-shelf accessibility, but that may very well be changing over the next year or so.  I Commend Code Factory for making a way for greater accessibility in the meantime and dropping the price to something a little more affordable than their previous offerings.  I’m a little disappointed at some feature gaps that shouldn’t be, but I expect the next version will fill them and add more useful functions.

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Accessibility Milestone

Posted on May 15, 2011

Yesterday was a first.  I walked into a retail store and walked out with a piece of modern technology that was blind friendly out of the box.  It is a Samsung Epic 4G, otherwise known as the Galaxy S.  The phone runs Android.  Yes, the iPhone was first, but for various reasons both personal and practical I didn’t buy an iPhone.

I do need to qualify my claim.  It was necessary for me to ask the salesperson to activate Talkback for me, which involved offering up my Google account credentials.  After that, I was off and running.  Android definitely has some accessibility issues, but it is useable.  Add in Mobile Accessibility from Code Factory and you have a device that is easily capable of doing the things you expect your smart phone to be able to do.  I should state for the record that you can manage the phone without the $97 app, but it will definitely improve your experience if you can afford it.  Here’s a link that will help.

A couple of up-front tips will help the new Android user who is blind.  Most importantly, you need a phone with some kind of physical navigation aid.  A touch pad would do, though I imagine that would be difficult to use precisely.  Physical buttons, whether on the body of the phone or as part of a slide-out keyboard, would be better.  The problem is that Android does not provide a way for screen readers to implement alternative touch navigation to applications that are not specifically designed for it. The applications within Mobile Accessibility do allow for touch only navigation.  Once you have it talking, another thing you will need to know is that the controls in apps are accessed by moving directionally to where they are located on the screen.  In other words, moving just up and down may not bring you to all of the available controls.  Also be aware that the application may not present everything in a grid pattern.  It will take some trial and error to figure out how to navigate to some controls, and then you can only hope they are labeled.  Android leaves it up to developers to design their apps properly.  There are a few accessible applications out there.  A growing collection of accessibility reviews can be found at Android Access, a site run by A T Guys, which markets Mobile Accessibility in the U.S.  Their vendor site appears to be under a hack attack at the time of this writing so I won’t link to it.

My conclusion is this.  Accessibility is not perfect but we have better options now than ever before.  I am delighted to have walked out of a retail establishment actually using the device they sold me.  The future looks bright.  I’m expecting future developments to make things even better, and I’m crying no tears over the loss of my ever-crashing Windows Mobile phone.

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Squashing My Fedora; Trying On VINUX

Posted on March 26, 2010

The world is burning around me and I’m burning disks. This is part two of my adventure trying to get a speech enabled installation of Linux working on my old PC. I’m posting this with a lot of detail in it because I intend to share it with the author of the distribution that I ended up installing. Newbie’s like me need a little more help than the existing documentation provides and I hope he will link to this or even borrow the relevant text from it. I’ll call it open source.

I ended my last account in premature triumph that I had a console based installation of Fedora 12 up and running with Speakup. See the previous post for links if you’re interested, but I’m about to give you better ones if you want a speech enabled installation. I dove into a beginner’s book on the Linux command line and quickly learned that my installation was severely crippled. Only the most basic commands were available. The man command didn’t even work. Doubtless I could have fixed it up if I was experienced in Linux, but I’m installing it because I want to learn it. I didn’t have the skills needed to heal a broken system out of the box so to speak. Forcing the installation routine into text mode results in an extremely minimalist installation.

I decided to start over and try the GUI installation again. I muddled through with the help of a magnifier and the camera on my phone. It was very blurry at such a close range but I managed to read with it. I need the text very big. That installation did result in a working system, but not one I could use. After my last entry here I learned that most distributions of Linux do now have a screen reader. It’s called Orca, and also provides screen magnification. It’s not quite as powerful as the big name Windows screen readers, but it does provide access to the GUI Gnome environment. However, when I started Orca there was no sound. The magnification worked, but not well. Portions of the screen would not fill in correctly when magnified, making it almost impossible to do anything. I suspect the problem with the speech was easily solvable if one could use the computer without it or had the experience to troubleshoot the sound, but not me.

That’s when another Internet search turned up VINUX. VINUX takes a unique approach to the problem of a speech enabled installation. It boots a functional copy of the OS from the CD, complete with Orca speech. Icons on the screen or through the system menu accessed by pressing ALT-F1 allow you to install from the CD, or just play around with the OS to get a feel for it. It can also install to a USB drive. VINUX is a Debian distribution that is modified to run Orca and Speakup as part of the installation, so that once you’re done you have a talking OS. You don’t need an old hardware synthesizer like the serial Dectalk I needed for the Speakup modified Fedora installation.

My fancy new Fedora desktop being essentially worthless to me, I decided to try VINUX. The documentation on the site gave me just enough information to get the CD going, but I quickly ran into some minor bumps in the road. The image isn’t really aimed at beginners. You will do well to read up on basic keyboard navigation in Gnome, which I still have not done. In fact, what I think I will do before formally offering this up is to go ahead and do that, then separate this narrative into a more focused beginner’s guide. For the moment, maybe it will still be helpful if it comes up in a search by other blind users looking for a workable solution. I’m going to work mostly from memory, so I take full responsibility for any inaccuracy you may find.

VINUX comes with a slightly different look than most. Instead of the typical top and bottom strips, there is a double column of large icons at the side of the screen. According to the author this was done to make common tasks easier to find and use for people who are visually impaired. Trial and error didn’t yield up the key combination that would get me into the icon panel at the side of the screen. Directly clicking on one of the columns didn’t work either, or at least using the arrow keys didn’t result in Orca saying anything as I attempted to move around. Remembering what little I did read on using Orca, I found the setting to speak tool tips on the General tab. With that turned on, I was able to locate the icon for installing from the CD. However I found this to be unreliable, probably due to running the system off the CD and the age of the CPU I am running. I later discovered that pressing ALT-F1 brings up a menu from which you can navigate to the installation by arrowing down to System, then pressing the right arrow to go into it. Press the right arrow again to enter the Administration menu. The installation options are near the bottom of the menu. You can go up to wrap around to the bottom.

Here are some quick notes about Orca. It occasionally stopped speaking. It did not appear to have crashed, but I found in the VINUX documentation that pressing CTRL-SHIFT-O would cause it to restart. If you lose speech this should bring it back, though once I had to do it twice. You may find it helpful to use the Orca link above to get acquainted with its basic keyboard commands. I also found that when using the partitioning program that we will come to shortly it did not read the new choice in a drop-down after you selected it. If you have doubts about what you selected, do it again. Again this could be due to a combination of old PC and running off a CD. On a bit of a trivial note, American listeners may need a little adjustment time getting to understand Orca’s speech. It’s a fairly good speech engine, but it speaks with a British accent and has a more robotic sound than you will be used to with a Windows screen reader. This is something you can change once you’ve installed. I switched to Flight, which is very clear.

Once you have found and launched the installation program, you will get a warning that this is an advanced installation and not to use it unless you know what you are doing. This is a fair warning. My first attempt at installation resulted in an unbootable machine, even though I thought I had read and understood best practices for Linux partitioning. In my case I am using a spare machine so rendering it a boat anchor was just a minor setback. If you are installing to a computer that already has valuable data on it, make sure you back up and are sure of the choices you should make.

The installation program will then ask you to select the drive, which you do by use of the arrow keys and Enter. I don’t know if this would be presented if the computer has only one hard drive. Mine has two. The partitioning utility will launch and present you with a list of current partitions. You will land on a button whose use is unclear. Press Tab to move through the sections of the screen until you find the tree view and select partitions by moving with the arrow keys. What you do from here depends on what kind of installation you are planning to do. I am not experienced enough to advise you, but I will tell you what I did to get my system running.

In my case, I had a previous installation of Linux, so it appeared at first that I had little work to do. However, the installation program specifically states that you need a swap partition, and no swap partition was present. I did some reading and thought I understood what to do, but apparently I didn’t. I left the boot partition unchanged, deleted a second partition (press Delete) and established a swap partition and another for everything else. My first mistake may have been in how I arranged them. The partitions will be set up in the order they appear on the screen. I put the swap directly after the boot and then added the largest part after that. The advice I read said to put the swap at the end. Whatever the reason, the first install was a dud. It may also be that I didn’t make the boot partition large enough, though I didn’t change it much from what Fedora created. No errors appeared to be reported, but I suspect the installer was not able to create a bootable configuration the way I had it arranged. The solution was to go with the minimum configuration suggested by the documentation. I put one large partition on the drive marked as bootable and the swap at the end. To summarize what I read about the swap size, it should be at least as big as the physical RAM you have in your system but double to be safe. Servers might potentially need more. Though I plan to play with the system as a test server, the install doesn’t appear to provide enough flexibility to set up the partitions as recommended by the things I read. I think I can adjust later as I gain more experience.

Let’s get back to the process. Again, I only have experience with creating a fresh Linux only setup, so that is what I will describe. To make a fresh start, delete the existing partition(s) using the Del key. Now, create the root partition. Press CTRL-N to bring up the dialog. Orca will read the whole thing. You can sometimes stop it by use of the CTRL key, or you can interrupt it by pressing Tab to move around the screen. The first field contains the amount of free space you want to have before the new partition starts. For our purposes, leave it alone. Press Tab to move to the size field. You can type in megabytes how large you want the partition to be, or you can use the arrows and PGUP/PGDN to move by ones or by hundreds. For our purposes, leave this field at maximum and move to the next one. This tells you how much space will be free. Since we are only going to create a root partition and a swap partition, set the amount of free space to the size you want your swap partition to be. Next will be a checkbox that toggles whether or not the program should round to the nearest cylinder. Leave it checked. Next is a drop-down to choose whether the partition is Primary or Extended. Leave it Primary and go to the file system drop-down. Press space here and use the arrows to select ext3. Press Space or Enter to select. As mentioned above, Orca may not read your new choice. When you press Tab again, Orca will just say “text.” This is the field for labeling the partition. I left this blank. Tab to the OK button and Press Enter.

You will be returned to the tree view. Highlight your new partition and press ALT-P to bring down the Partition menu. Arrow to the Manage Flags option near the bottom and press Enter. You will be presented with a dialog having a series of checkable options. Make sure Boot is checked by moving to it with the arrows and pressing Space if necessary. Tab to the close button and press Enter.

You will again be in the partition list. Make sure the unallocated entry is highlighted and press CTRL-N. Everything should be just like you want it except for the file system. Tab to that and select Linux Swap. Tab to OK and press Enter. You are now ready to commit your changes. This is done from the edit menu. There may be and ALT key combination to get to it, but it isn’t ALT-E. I arrived there by pressing ALT-P again and then using the left arrow to go backwards to the Edit menu. There you will find the option to apply your changes. You will be presented with a last chance to reconsider as what you are about to do will destroy the data preexisting on the disk. Pressing Enter commits you for good.

Orca will speak progress as it goes. When completed, a small dialog will appear giving you the opportunity to review the details of what was done. If you’re as green as I am you may not find that very useful. I didn’t’ look at it. Tab to the Close button and press Enter. You’re ready now to quit the partition editor. CTRL-Q is supposed to do that and it did as I just had the program up for reference while writing this, but when I tried it from the install it didn’t. Fortunately the old Windows sequence of ALT-F4 did quit the program.

The installer will ask you a few more questions, which I may or may not be remembering in their proper order. Each is answered by highlighting a choice with the arrow keys and pressing enter. First you will be asked where the swap drive is. It will be shown as /dev/hda2 or something similar. Then you will be asked where to put the root. Choose your boot partition. It may also ask where to put /home, but I think it skipped that question the second time I ran it since I only had one place it could go. You will also be asked what to do with the boot loader. For a single OS installation like we are doing here, select the master boot record (MBR.) The installation will now commence. Orca may be rather chatty at this point. Sometimes the CTRL key will shut him up for a while, but you may hear a lot of things being read as the installation progresses. When the process is finished, you will be given the opportunity to reboot your system to test the new installation. If all is well, the next thing you hear should be what sounds like Orca asking for your login information. There is no screen review capability at this point, as Orca is not really loaded yet. The login prompt is pre-recorded. You will not get audible feedback as you type in your user name, press Enter, type your password and press Enter again. You will get a message saying that your login was accepted (assuming it was) and the desktop should come up. At this point you’re pretty much on your own, as that’s about all I know right now. I did find that on my system for some reason the right hand ALT key is not performing its assigned function from the desktop. To bring up the menus accessible from the ALT-F1 key combination, I have to use the left ALT. I do not know if this will be common to any installation or if it’s some peculiarity of mine. I also ran into a problem waking the computer up from sleep mode. The monitor did not revive and Orca did not speak. I had to power off. This probably is an issue with my particular machine and may be resolvable by finding the right hardware driver fixes.

Note that on some systems, including mine, the shutdown from the CD may freeze. If this happens, you will need to manually power off your system. Allow some time before resorting to this as the shutdown process is slow. The CD should eject, and you may want to remove the CD from the tray at this point.

Finally, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Tony Sales for putting this package together. It was very gratifying to be able to perform an installation of a new OS with no sighted assistance and not even resort to hand magnifiers that don’t’ make things big enough for me anyway. I’m so delighted that I hate to even make any suggestions for improvement, but I do have a couple. First, a more newbie friendly document would be very helpful with perhaps some links for other sources of beginner’s information. Maybe I can help with that, though being inexperienced myself I may not be the best choice. Second, even old junkers like my test PC usually have DVD drives these days. A full installation image that could be burned to a DVD would be a nice touch, thus eliminating the need to install stock programs after the fact.

Thank you once again for doing this. Maybe as I become more proficient I can be of use in making it even better. From time to time maybe I will post some more progress notes and tips from what I learn along the way.

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Wearing My Fedora

Posted on March 20, 2010

I am not vane enough to imagine that anyone missed me, but because it has been a while since I wrote anything I thought I would explain why. My old PC that was becoming a daily test of my patience and commitment to purity of thought and speech has now become my new toy. I recently bought a new desktop, so I got two for one. I’ve been itching to get my hands on Linux for several years, but the obstacle was always that it didn’t have a screen reader. The only thing I knew of was an operating environment called Emacspeak. From the sound of it you need applications that are coded for it. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a replacement OS, though ditching Windows wouldn’t bother me in the least. I certainly wasn’t looking for one for which access to applications would be limited. I decided to wait until someone came up with a better solution.

In the last couple of years, thanks to building the web site for the church and foreseeing a need to become more expert in the most likely OS for building out servers in the future, I’ve become interested again in trying it out. I ran across Speakup, an integrated solution for making the GNU Linux console speech enabled. Fortunately I still had my old Dectalk serial speech synthesizer, since most of the installs that are speech enabled require a hardware synthesizer. That includes the one I chose. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I still don’t. The Speakup modified distribution of Fedora I chose basically because I recognized the name didn’t just start talking when I put in the DVD I had burned. Right in the middle of my effort the site where I got the image disappeared, so I couldn’t get to the documentation. It should have been a red flag when the link from the Speakup site to the documentation didn’t work the first time I tried it.

With a little trial and error and the knowledge that all the flavors have similar command sets, I was able to get the install talking. Once done and rebooted, it stopped talking. I worked that out too, but I have yet to learn how to make it boot that way every time. Now I’m ready for the adventure. I went and found a few beginner Linux books to get me started. I had hoped for a speech enabled graphical environment, but the power of Linux is in the command line anyway, so maybe being forced to learn it up front will serve me well.

So, if I remain silent, you’ll know where I am.

[root@localhost ~]#

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Getting Mobilized

Posted on August 26, 2009

Last week I got a new cell phone. I’ve wanted one for some time now because I want to be able to read text messages. Really I just want to be able to use all the features of my phone wherever I happen to be. For that I need a phone that talks.

I think there is a low-end talking cell phone provided by one of the other carriers but not by Sprint. It was a very low end phone if I remember. I need to be able to get text pages from work even if I can’t read them when I’m not at home, so that wasn’t an option. Right now, to get a fully speech enabled phone you need a “smart phone” running Symbian or Windows Mobile unless you go for the new iPhone. I’m curious about how well a blind user can work with a speech enabled touch screen like that of the iPhone and I have to give Apple credit for building it into every phone. However, it’s one of the most expensive options and I’d have to get out of my contract and change carriers. That’s a really expensive phone!

About a year ago when I smashed my phone in a fall I considered getting a speech capable model, but I didn’t want to spend the money and then find I hated the thing or just couldn’t really use it effectively. I opted for a cheap upgrade, and then discovered by accident that it had rudimentary speech capability. I understand several models now do this if you know how to dig it out of the menus. Mine was a Samsung M300. It can read caller’s names when they call and as you scroll through them. It reads menus and contact details. The voice is very crude, but it was much more than I thought I had. It does not read the web or text messages. It does not read what you enter in text fields.

Now that I’ve gotten into Facebook and to a much lesser degree Twitter, I’ve become envious of the people who send updates from everywhere. Sometimes I wonder at the wisdom of what they’re saying from where, but that’s another topic for another day. I wanted to do that too, and when my wife went swimming with her phone, my opportunity arose. We had the same model and she likes it. They don’t sell it anymore so I gave her mine and got a brand new HTC Snap.

I’d already been doing some preliminary research in hopes that I might be able to get a talking phone. I didn’t necessarily want one as powerful as the one I bought. Mainly I wanted text messaging that I could read. I was disappointed with the information available from Sprint. The phone they recommend on their web site (LG Rumor 2) may indeed do what they claim, but it sure doesn’t seem to say so in the manual. I say “seem to” because the PDF manual is not formatted for accessibility. Most of the words all run together when read by a screen reader. From what I have read and heard from others, every other carrier is doing a better job of providing the information blind customers need to determine what to buy. AT&T even sells Mobile Speak at a steep discount. Nevertheless, because of my contract and my wife wanting to keep the phone she likes, I bought a Sprint phone.

The HTC runs Windows Mobile 6.1, so I downloaded and installed Mobile Speak from Code Factory. Symbian users have another choice in a program called Talks, but as far as I know Mobile Speak is the only Windows Mobile option. The install routine sets the screen reader and magnifier up as a 30 day demo on your phone. I’m still running the demo, but since it’s the only option I have I will be paying up soon. I’ve had it for just over a week.

Installation was easy, but Code factory makes you jump through hoops to buy the license. It’s a transferable license, so it will be good on any phone, but you must go through one of their dealers and there is no fully automated way to buy from any of them. Come on folks! That’s ridiculous for such a high tech piece of software. I should modify that slightly. I didn’t check with AT&T, assuming I could only buy it there for an AT&T phone.

As with any screen reader, there’s a bit of a learning curve. It took me a while to remember the basic commands and I’m still not proficient at them. It reads most basic functions well, but there are some problem areas. Naturally, the first thing I did was go to Facebook’s mobile site. After struggling through my login on the tiny keyboard, I was delighted to hear it start reading through my friends’ updates. Moving around is easy enough, but if you’re used to all the tricks a modern screen reader on a PC uses to help you find what you want on a page a mobile phone browser is going to take some adjustment. The obvious solution seemed to be the dedicated Facebook app provided by Microsoft. That didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. It is usable, but Mobile Speak doesn’t reliably read each item completely as you move to it. I think a cursor delay feature as found on PC screen readers could help but I don’t know that it would fix it. Using the program’s review cursor it is possible to find out what’s on the screen, but this is an impractical solution when not much fits on a mobile phone screen. In short, not every application is going to work with the screen reader, just like in Windows on a PC.

One of the first thoughts I had as I experienced my first crash was, “I can’t believe I just bought a phone running Windows!” Whether the occasional application crashes are attributable to Mobile Speak or something else I can’t say, since this is the only phone of this type I’ve ever had. It’s also slow. Again I don’t know if that’s just being a Windows Mobile phone or if Mobile Speak really puts a drag on it. I have found that just like a Windows PC, a Windows phone has to be rebooted from time to time.

You’d think from this review that I’m not happy with my purchase. I guess I am slightly disappointed, but since when has a first generation of any piece of software been free of bugs. Yes, actually Mobile Speak is up to 2.1 I think, but still the whole technology is pretty fresh. I expect it will get better. For now I am just thrilled to have a phone I can use to do everything I want to do. I know I’ll find some things easier as I learn both the phone and the screen reader.

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