Assistive Technology

Today, Apple released iOS 7.1 with numerous accessibility improvements. While these features are not as exciting as the accessibility features added in major releases of iOS they still offer advantages for many users. Most of the improvements focus on making the new iOS interface easier to see for people with visual impairments. Turning on bold text now makes the keyboard, calculator, and in app icons bold in addition to text. A new option found under the accessibility menu allows users to turn on button shapes which makes it easier to distinguish text from buttons. In addition to limiting the parallax effect, reduce motion now limits multitasking animations and animations in the weather and messages apps. iOS 7.1 also allows users to darken colors used in apps to make them easier to view and increase the white point of the display to cut down on glare. Button Shapes iOS 7.1 also includes a number of VoiceOver bug fixes, but some are still present in iOS 7.1. In addition to accessi...

Prizmo 2.0 for iOS was just released in the App Store. Prizmo now works on the iPad as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch. The update includes many exciting new features. The original version of Prizmo included optical character recognition ( OCR ) but did not include the ability to scan documents to a PDF or text file. The PDF files are not just images but include searchable text. Prizmo 2.0 also allows users to export the documents to other apps. To create a new document in Prizmo you can simply take a picture of multiple pages. Prizmo will automatically detect the edges of the page. In version 2.0 you no longer have to crop documents manually. Once you have captured all of the pages you can recognize the text of the document which is surprisingly fast and accurate. If the Prizmo does make a mistake you can edit the OCR zones or manually edit the text. After the text has been recognized you can email or export the document as a PDF or te...

Today Amazon updated their Kindle iOS app with VoiceOver support. VoiceOver   is a gesture controlled screen reader for the iPhone , iPad , and iPod Touch designed to help the blind and visually impaired. The text-to-speech feature can benefit people with dyslexia as well. Amazon describes the new features as follows, "Accessibility features make it easier for blind and visually impaired customers to navigate their Kindle libraries, read & interact with books, and more. Enable VoiceOver in your device settings to begin." VoiceOver support for the Kindle app comes shortly after the Nook app was updated with VoiceOver support. Despite VoiceOver support it is possible that certain books may have accessibility issues that make them inaccessible. Irronically, the Kindle iOS app is now more accessible for the blind and vissually impaired than physical Kindles. Kindle for iOS is avalible as a free update in the App Store . Click read more to view screenshots of the...