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| Sunday, April 3rd, 2022 | | 10:18 am |
Your Other Password Manager
In the last blog post, I discussed keys. But you have another device you use to manage passwords before computers came along...your wallet. Your wallet is actually quite a different beast than your keychain...every card in your wallet has some identifying features...a corporate logo, or a photo, and lots of numbers. If your wallet is anything like mine, it has too many cards and not enough cash. Most cards contain authentication info; they identify you to at least one organization. Your driver's license authenticates you with your US state of residence (and is usually recognized by other states and by many organizations). You might have a card authenticating you to your workplace or school. ( Read more...Collapse ) | | Saturday, March 26th, 2022 | | 6:03 pm |
You Already Have Two Password Managers
You already have two password managers that you have been using since you were a child: your keychain and your wallet. In this post, I'll focus on your keychain. Before we dive further, we should be familiar with two concepts: authentication and authorization, two terms that sound very similar, and are often used in the same context, but provide very different features. Authentication, sometimes known as identification, is the process of convincing a person or system of who you are. Your driver's license does this. Authorization is the process of convincing a person or system that you are allowed access, without providing authorization. Your driver's license does this too; it authorizes you to drive a car. So the two concepts often go together, but not always. Your house key does not authenticate who you are, but it does authorize you to enter your house. In lieu of a driver's license, you can get a US state ID, which authenticates who you are (as it contains your photo and birth date and is created by your state's DMV), but it does not authorize you to drive. You can have authorization without authentication. For example, a state ID or driver's license, by providing authentication, may allow you to withdraw money from a bank. But so can a gun. ( Read more...Collapse ) | | Saturday, March 19th, 2022 | | 4:33 pm |
The best passwords are the ones you never need to type.
Most passwords are associated with websites. Any website can be accessed with a browser, and we will assume that your password manager runs on the same machine as the website. Your password manager may be nothing fancier than a plain text file with your passwords listed. It could always be the password database built into your browser, or it could be an add-on to your browser. The important functionality for the password manager is that it can copy your password to the clipboard, so that you can paste the password in the form that your website is demanding. The ability to paste a password is critical to secure password management. This is because the more secure a password is; the more 'unusual' characters it has, and the harder it is to type. Consider these five passwords, generated automatically using the LastPass web add-on, which allowed all types of characters:
- *2I&JAoaf8#6
- quD1d@EM#d39
- ScSrO85r&&%r
- J*f1%*Sw5Kdg
- *72I7fydiL$i
These 5 passwords are each 12 characters in length with 60 characters in all. Of these 60, 20 are lowercase letters, 13 uppercase letters, 14 numbers, and 12 symbols. Typing any of these passwords requires extra use of your shift key for the capital letters and some punctuation. All punctuation characters are at the corners of your keyboard, or along the top row. None of these passwords are as easy to type as prose, let alone memorize. ( Read more...Collapse ) | | Monday, June 15th, 2015 | | 8:27 pm |
Neala's Face Lyft
Today Neala had was an impromptu tech session learning the ins and outs of one particular app: Lyft. Not that she planned it; it just happened. It started in the morning with her jaw. It hurt. A lot. Clearly a trip to the dentist was in order, and Neala uses Greater Pittsburgh Orthopaedic Associates. One quick phone call and she had an emergency appointment at 11.But their office is about two miles from her apartment, and she isn't exactly licensed to drive. At this point, her usual strategy is to hail a taxi. Sometimes the taxi shows up; sometimes it doesn't. (It is possible that the taxi drives by, but doesn't see Neala, and Neala has no way of knowing when it is nearby, or where to rendezvous (other than a street address, which can be vague.) Her apartment is on the corner of a prominent intersection with no street parking. Her apartment has a driveway and garage where she often waits, but she is not visible curbside while she waits inside, and when she waits outside, she has no way of knowing when the taxi has arrived. All told, she usually plans for an hour to take a 2-mile ride which normally takes 15 minutes in non-rush-hour traffic. Could Lyft do better? With a swollen jaw, Neala also didn't want to see the dentist alone. So after a quick phone call, I agreed to 'demo' Lyft for her. We would summon a ride, using my account, and she and Toby wouldl accompany me to the dentist. And we could Lyft back. I would pay for the rides, with her reimbursing me later. Lyft easily trumps taxis before the driver has arrived; it shows a map of nearby drivers. Once I summon a driver, I receive an ETA (of 9 minutes) when the driver would arrive. The map also highlights my driver, so I could 'spy' on him as he approached. Both the map and ETA are updated in real time. So I could order Neala out from the garage 5 minutes before pickup. I also got images of the driver and the car, so I would know what to look for. Finally, I got a text when the driver arrived. For me, this makes Lyft much better than taxis. Not so for Neala. The app is only somewhat accessible. Maps are hard for VoiceOver to narrate to a blind person, of course, but VO would not even read the ETA to her. The images of the car and driver were useless to her. Lyft could solve this by recording the driver's voice and the car horn...both she and I would appreciate that. Especially if the driver gives a quick beep of the horn when they arrive at the pickup site. This would have solved the nasty problem that the driver did not stop in our driveway, but continued past the intersection and around the corner. It wasn't his fault, barring the driveway, this was the only location where he could stop and pick us up. I was able to run to the corner to confirm him as my driver, but how would Neala handle this? Possibly we could phone the driver to tell him about the driveway, but without a phonecall, he only had my current location as reported by my smartphone. Having the driver beep their horn, especially after sharing the beep along with their face and car photos, would make the process of approaching a driver who is a stranger less awkward for me, and less impossible for Neala. Fortunately things went like clockwork once we had hooked up. Neala and Toby took the backseat while I rode shotgun, and Neala even remembered the customary fist bump expected of Lyft passengers. The driver even recognized her, apparently from a nearby restaurant. And he was very sympathetic to her problems, having some health issues of his own. He got 5 stars, and a generous tip. Total time: 10 minutes in the ride, and 10 minutes waiting, all for about $10 (including tip). Much better than a taxi. The downside is that we arrived over a half hour early. I'm not inclined to complain to Lyft :) The Lyft ride back was fairly uneventful, which is good. Another 10-minute ride, with 10-minute wait and $10. My conclusion is that Neala could use Lyft, but only after they make some accessibility improvements. Tricky because the main interface is a map, but there are lots of non-map items that VoiceOver could have read but didn't. Adding sounds to recognize drivers and car horns would also be helpful. Some drivers are apparently uncomfortable schlepping guide dogs around (although both our drivers were quite accepting of them). Uber has been sued by the National Federation for the Blind, on the grounds that their drivers have discriminated against blind people by refusing to transport their guide dogs, among other things. (Lyft has not been similarly sued...yet). On top of that, Neala's device is an iPod Touch. She could technically run Lyft on it, but once she leaves her apartment, she loses Wi-Fi and internet access. So using Lyft would be possible, but very tricky, and it would make harder the already-difficult task of meeting with a stranger driving a strange car. Anyone have any better suggestions? | | Tuesday, May 5th, 2015 | | 10:07 pm |
Accessibility Segregation
Last week I was reading about how accessability is provided in IOS here. The relevant paragraph is:
Accessibility Enabled
This is a master switch for whether the element is accessible or not. UIViews and any custom direct subclasses of it are not accessible by default, whereas UIControls are. Elements which are not marked as accessible will be ignored by VoiceOver, and will be skipped when the user is navigating between accessible elements. In other words, for each button, menu, etc. in your app, you can specify whether VoiceOver reads it or not. And this is completely independent of whether the item is actually visible or not. I suspect the rationale behind this is that VoiceOver by default does ignore some items. Lots of GUI widgets serve as contaners for other widgets. Or they show images or designs that are strictly for appearance, and have no actual function. But my first thought regarding teh purpose of this switch was darker. It was made to segregate blind people from sighted people, in order to give them a different experience. You can clearly use this to make a button usable only by the sighted, while you can build another button that is invisible but read by VoiceOver. That is, it is usable only by the blind. You can use this to build two different interfaces for sighted and for blind people separately. And it works much like segregation worked in the US. It's not unlike making a drinking fountain only for the white folks, and a second one only for the black folks. And Apple's accessability seems to work about as well as US segregation did. It separates the blind people from the sighted people, and offers blind people a second-class experience. For example, consider the CBS website. When viewed in Safari on a Mac or PC, the top of the website provides a menu bar, that can be used to quickly navigate the site. But when viewed on an iPad, this website hides the menu from the sighted. However, it is read by VoiceOver. Not as a menu, but instead as a list. Of items that cannot be selected. In this case both the blind and the sighted user have suboptimal experiences.
Doubtless this is because CBS would rather you use their free iOS app. The app has a menu button on the upper left of the screen. For sighted users, clicking on it brings up the same menu as www.cbs.com, and this menu can be traversed to navigate the site. VoiceOver reads the menu button, but ignores the menu completely. Which makes the CBS app completely un-navigable by the blind.When Neala wants to watch a CBS show on her iProp, I have to run the app, navigate to find her show, and leave her alone to watch it. If she pauses, often the app will not resume...its video player is completely different than Apple's standard video players, and often does not resume, sometimes it doesn't play at all. I feel like I just filled a glass of water and gave it to a black person. | | Saturday, February 28th, 2015 | | 4:22 pm |
| | Friday, February 13th, 2015 | | 7:58 pm |
Buying Amy
Given how often Neala has to touch her iProp's screen, I thought it was a major accessibility blunder for Apple to make it impossible to find the screen boundaries by touch. Today I endowed Neala's iPod touch with a low-budget solution: rubber bands. They seem to work...she finds the screen edges much more quickly now. Hopefully they will last until Apple fixes the accessability bugs. Neala wanted to buy Amy. We 'met' Amy last week while exploring Voice Dream Reader. She was the first synthetic voice in the list with a British accent; though to my ears she sounds Scottish...straight out of Hogwarts. After going to the 'add voices' section of Voice Dream Reader, Neala stopped to 'window shop', trying out the other voices she forgot. Amy cost $5, but she sounds really good, and Neala melted when Amy started to read "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglas". Neala also wanted to try other software that was nominated for an awward by Applevis: this week se tried Overcast. A simple download. Overcast doesn't seem much different than Apple's own podcast app. But it had high reviews, and seems to have more thought poured into the UI. I suppose we'll discover this as Neala uses podcasts more. She had discovered old-time radio, and many episodes were available as podcasts. But old-time radio isn't exactly being produced anymore, so I'd like to get her into modern podcasts. Both fact & fiction. She has downloaded the first episode of Serial, listened to a bbit, but will resume it later when I'm gone. We also read (well, listened actually) to the newest AppleVis newsletter; both of us got it in the mail. Long newsletter. Neala tried the Voice Dream Reader podcast. But it turned out to be a basic instruction and audio demo. Rather boring, as Neala has already learned how to use the app. We then tried to figure out how to resume the Applevis newletter mail from that part to the end. I thought VO-I would let us search for that spot for resuming. But the keyboard refused to cooperate; it entered 2 or 3 chars for every single key we pressed. Useless. Another VO feature butchered by IOS 8. I wound up scrolling through 50 of the 60 pages of the email to resume the newsletter. In the end we found nothing memorable of this first article. Not surprising, the article we found interesting was the Golden Apples awards article, listing 'best-of' nominees. | | Wednesday, February 4th, 2015 | | 9:24 am |
Tracy, Amy, and Tyler
...are Neala's new friends. A worldly bunch. Amy is from the UK, although her Scottish brogue betrays her true heritage. And Tyler hails from down under. Neala has liked them since she first heard their voices. Which is all that they are. Synthetic voices. They are packaged with the Voice Dream Reader app, which uses those voices or the builtin IOS voices that Siri and VoiceOver can use. It uses them to read text. The text can come from lots of places....we chose Project Gutenberg as an ideal source for free books. We spent this evening learning this app. Which is a little like the iBook app on steroids. It had rave reviews, and received a Golden Apple award from AppleVis. So it had a serious pedigree. Neala has been using the iBooks app to read War and Peace. Which is going slowly...its a long book. So VDR has more flexibility & power...but is it more suitable for her? Quite probably. It has very powerful fast-forward and rewind buttons that iBooks lacks. It has very distinct behavior for when VoiceOver is active. I suppose you could use VO to read the pages, but even with VO on, VDR can use its custom voices to read. And it uses the audio controls (play/pause/next/previous) to manage playback. Granted, many of the custom voices are not as nice as Tracy & the others. We had fun figuring out why (this one had too much Prozac, that one is on helium, that one too much lachs, etc). Most of the voices are not as high-quality as Samantha, the default voice used by Siri, or Alex, the default voice for the iPhone 6 or OS X. But they all have their individual personalities and quirks. The app also taught Neala about crippleware. It has a 'lite' version that is free, but pauses reading about once every 2 sentences. So it is useful to see how the real version works, but it is pretty useless as a reading tool by itself. The real app is $10, and behaves pretty much like the lite one. Oh...one other thing. In the lite app all the extra voices are free for 200-300 characters, and in the real app the voices are in-app purchases...$2 to $5 each. Neala hasn't bought any voices yet, but she's sampled them several times, and I suspect she'll have 2-3 within a few weeks. | | Saturday, January 31st, 2015 | | 10:19 am |
| | 7:13 am |
Android Accessibility
You may recall that Neala spent one evening trying to use an Android phone. Very little progress, but that could be because neither she, I nor the phone's owner knew anything about Android accessability. Here's a post describing a blind man's attempts to use Android. He had much more time and patience than us. But it still aint pretty. | | Monday, January 26th, 2015 | | 9:30 pm |
The Madcap Store, and Other Tales
Does anyone gift-wrap presents for blind people? We didn't. My wife and I bought Neala a K-cup organizer. She didn't touch it (she already has one) but she expressed appreciation. Neala got a phone charger (a Horizon) from QVC; she needed help setting it up. Pretty straightforward, but the plugs fit very tight. No beeps though...a beeping charger is just what she would need. Only devices specifically made for blind people beep that much though. However, she believed the cord would recharge her iPod. Afraid not, it uses microUSB, not Lightning. I suppose it charges some phones. Neala complained that BARD mobile said it was 'offline'. This error message repeated itself after Neala presses 'ok'. Solved by reboot. Neala has to reboot about every week to fix some oddball problem we have never encoutnered before. She's getting pretty good at it...if only her iPod made some shutdown and startup sounds. Sigh. Neala next showed me an "i love you" spam mail that she was skeptical about. Neala has gotten hardly any spam, so she is unused to it. Spam turns everyone cynical; but it hadn't hit her yet. She had just enough natural paranoia to ask me about it first, before responding. I'm afraid I had to break her heart. :) We read AppleVis's golden apples announcement. Dice World won (as did VMWare Fusion). Yay! Neala wanted to know about the Madcap store. Never heard of it. Turns out that was how VO read the Mac app store. Neala wanted to learn Paypal, so we set up an account for her...using my laptop. I had earlier discovered that Paypal's mobile app is completely useless for creating a new account, and even the website wouldn't work properly under mobile Safari. Only on a laptop or desktop can you create accounts. Fortunately, with me driving, she was up and ready to use it in about 15 minutes. By which time she got to use it to make a $5 donation to AppleVis. Which mirrored my donation earlier that day. | | Tuesday, January 20th, 2015 | | 9:55 am |
Voting on Applevis
I got mail from applevis.com; they are collecting votes for the best apps of 2014. Since they focus on blind & visually-impaired users, these apps are either designed for blind people or are made accessible. I figured that today Neala and I would both cast votes, and we could also tinker with the apps we haven't tried before. In order to vote, Neala had to register. Usually I register for her, but as this was AppleVis, I figured she should be able to register for it. But after filling in the form, the web page froze on her. Most likely due to a session timeout. In my experience, many web forms will time out after 15 minutes; they assume you've moved on and are not going to respond after 15 minutes. But Neala still takes over 15 minutes to fill out a form. Seems the timeout should be longer. Anyway, I registered for her. For accessibility, the Applevis page starts off with an interal 'go to main body' link. It's invisible to sighted people, but read by VoiceOver, and it cause VO to skip over the header boilerplate and go to the article's main content. We've used it many times before. But now it fails. It goes to the main body region, but won't read text. And VO then skips over the actual body of text. Safari added a 'readable version' button several years ago, which strips out headers & boilerplate. But while it works on the voting page, it leaves out the form you actually use to vote. So its useless. Furthermore, the voting page has a list of candidates with no voting fields. The field where you vote for them comes later. Confusing. I decided the best way to muddle through this was to cast my own vote separately from Neala, that way I would be familiar with the process when I helped her. Trying to navigate on her iPod w/o knowing what to expect is the blind leading the blind. Used her phone to navigate to vote form. It uses a 'peeker item' GUI widget to let her choose what to vote for. But this peeker item could not be selected from keyboard, only from screen. So I voted twice; once for me, and once for her. To conclude, applevis.com, a website dedicated to IOS accessibility, is itself not accessible on IOS 8. I suspect this is Apple's fault, not Applevis's. We had no trouble navigating the website back when we used IOS 7. Neala wanted to try some of the nominee apps that Applevis recommended. We tried A Dark Room, a text adventure game. Oops, the current term for these is 'interactive fiction'. $1. I tried it on my phone to make sure it works fine before letting Neala use it. Even Apple's App Store gives Neala trouble. Ctrl-up/down, which normally goes to the first or last item, is not working. But she has started the game, and is intrigued. Perhaps Neala would benefit from other text-adv...er interactive fiction games. We'll see. After leaving, I wondered if a reboot would solve her accessibility problems. | | Tuesday, January 6th, 2015 | | 9:27 pm |
The Power of Prayer
This week began with a crisis: Neala called me to complain that her iPod had stopped working. At all. It remained silent no matter what she did. We've had this problem before; she has unwittingly muted the speaker in the past, and fixed it by turning up its volume. But this time the speaker volume didn't fix things. So the first thing I noticed was that her iPod's screen was on and working fine, but no sound came out. I proceeded to sit and watch while she described the problem. And as she explained the problem, and demonstrated turning the speaker off & on, suddenly her speaker worked again. Keep in mind that I had done nothing to the pod or speaker, just watched and listened. Now I know how God feels when people pray to him. Later... Her iPod broke again later when we tried to invoke Siri. Siri never gave its "I'm listening" beep, and her iProp remained silent. Until Neala diddled the speaker. That restored speech, but Siri didn't work. We couldn't get Siri to work. We solved this problem with a reboot. And we did another reboot so I could make sure Neala knows how to reboot. I'm again disappointed. I am unused to rebooting Apple products. The number of problems that are solved by a reboot on Apple products has been comfortingly low, but has jumped a good bit from IOS 8. Restarting IOS is also one of the few times where VoiceOver fails...it gives no audio indication when the iProp turns off or on. Contrast this to the opening chime chord of a rebooting Mac. How are blind people supposed to reboot computers? Leftovers: Neala played me some Youtube videos of her choir singing. We forwarded it to seveal people, re-encountering addressbook problems (see my previous post about Addressbook Woes) I tried to teach Neala the Item Chooser. It's a VoiceOver feature for quickly finding a button by doing a search on GUI objects. She's apprehensive because it is slow going for now, but I'm convinced she should practice with it & get fast, and it should make her more productive. Apple's UI is terribly inconsistent about what is a button or link (eg what can be clicked vs what can't). I am always telling Neala to select something that does interesting stuff but isn't identified as a button or link. The messages view in Mail is one example. | | Monday, December 29th, 2014 | | 1:11 pm |
Addressbook Woes
One day, Neala received an email with three 3AG files attached. They are recordings of her choir. She wanted to play these files, but iOS has no idea what the 3ag file format is. Neither do I...there seem to be hundreds of obscure audio file formats...software seems to hate to use mp3 for some reason. I thought there might be an IOS audio player to handle 3ag...perhaps VLC? But a quick search revealed nothing. So I suggested that Neala forward the mail to me, and I'd convert the files later and return them to her. And thus began the problems... Neala goes to her mail, and found 'forward', and tried to tried to add my email address. But her keyboard ddoouubblleedd eevveerryytthhiinngg!! WWTTFF???? We were able to eliminate the doubling by hitting left-right, which toggles quicknav. This works around the bug (but doesn't fix it). Next problem: Neala starts typing 'D-a-v', which reveals my email address on the screen just fine. Next she is supposed to navigate to it (remember she can't see that its there). But Ctrl-Opt-Right won't go past the 'Add To Addressbook', although plain right does fine. Another inconsistency. That hurdle cleared, Neala finds my email address provided. But when she hits Ctrl-Opt-Space, it doesn't select my email, it simply hops back to the To: field. Another inconsistency. Another workound, if Quicknav is turned on, then Up--down selects the address just as you'd expect. Now to send the message. Simple; navigate to the Send button and select it. But Ctrl-Opt-Space doesn't activate Send, it goes back to the To: field! Since it had worked before, we tried Up-Down to activate Send, but that also fails, it sends us back to the To: field. The only way to activate Send and send a message was to double-tap the screen on the Send link. Which Neala can't see. I should add that all of these bugs arose in iOS 8, which also added the feature of allowing you to shelve draft emails and changed the interface slightly. It seems to have completely hosed the VoiceOver interface. Why does Apple permit this inconsistency? Is iOS so un-modular that updates to the other systems can break VoiceOver so badly? | | Wednesday, December 17th, 2014 | | 9:31 am |
The Last Month
It had been a month since I blogged; the last weeks have been very similar to each other. Most of Neala's recent experiences have been wrestling with various accessibility bugs. Some come from Apple, most come from third-party clients. Who could fix them if they wanted to. I can access "The Young And The Restless" on CBS's app, but Neala can't. The app is not accessible, and even if you get to the video, it doesn't let you escape. CBS lets you view videos on its website, which is pretty accessible. But on IOS the website delegates videos to the app. Applevis says the app is accessible, but it isn't. WTF? This was somewhat solved by having Neala bring up today's TY&TR by asking Siri to search for it on CBS. This brings up website with list of videos; clicking on today's video brought it up correctly in the CBS app! (if only it always worked this well). Neala complains that the VO voice is choppy. Seems to happen when the pod is busy doing something else. She also complains that it ignores her for a while, then does a whole bunch of sounds at once. Typical swapping-out-then-in behavior. I turned off 'background app refresh'. which fixed the choppiness, but only temporarily. Neala wanted to try the Aussie voice to see if this fixes the VO sluggishness. Turns out VoiceOver was already set to Austrailian English, but still used British English. Two weeks later, while playing Dice World, VO switched to Austrailian English. WTF? Dice World has become Neala's gaming outlet. We updated to the newest version of Dice World; it has an in-app payment of $2 to eliminate ads. May purchase. I also am teaching her the new games added to Dice World. She enjoys 3's, but the 'bonus' UI is confusing. Instead of telling her she lost her turn, it offers a 'bonus round' for 1 gold. Unintuitive. Meanwhile I am also trying to teach Neala to play with other people. She started to play Farkle with Alfie, but stopped to take Toby out. Game still ongoing. | | Thursday, December 11th, 2014 | | 5:57 pm |
Could Neala use an Android phone?
Before we met this week, Neala had a question: how did other systems handle accessiblity these days? Is a Mac a better fit for her? How is Windows these days? Is the Android world better / worse than IOS?
To introduce her to the Android world, I brought my friend, Will, to see her, and Will brought his Nexus 4 smartphone, running Android 4.4.4. Like most visual people, Will could use his phone, but had never tried its accessiblity features. So he learned them alongside us this evening.
Google offers three accessiblity features for blind & low-vision people. One involves Braille integration. Neala can read Braille, but has always preferred to use a QWERTY keyboard to communicate with her iPod. So we have never worried about Braille.
The second is a zoom feature. Unlike IOS, Android's zoom isn't universal...Will was able to zoom the Mail message screen, but that only zoomed the part of the screen containing the message body...the rest of the screen remains unzoomed. IOS's zoom is app-independent, and works in the home screen and lock screen as well. It can focus on a part of the screen, but I prefer the whole-screen zoom. Besides that, Apple's mailreader and web browser (prob their HTML-rendering widget) allows zooming even without the accessability 'zoom' feature turned on. So IMO IOS wins that battle, but Neala doesn't care about zoom. She lives on IOS's VoiceOver, and her keyboard. I suppose she could use the screen if her hands weren't old and arthritic.
Android's analogue to VoiceOver is called TalkBack, freely available at Google's play store, and added on to most modern Android phones. I'll come to TalkBack in a moment.
It's also fair to count Siri as an accessibility feature, especially if you include VoiceOver's ability to read results that are produced by Siri. (Siri often cannot read her own search results, but VoiceOver can). Since Will is new to the whole world of accessibility, Neala & I showed Will how she uses her iPod. Neala and I were able to send text messages to each other, and call Will. (Will makes calls on his phone, but rarely receives them; he didn't even know his cell phone number & had to look it up). Neala was also able to do some web searches using Siri, just to show Will.
Will didn't know of any comparable service in Android. (Doesn't Google Now do these kind of things?)
Leaving Siri aside, Will also watched...er listened while Neala updated her apps, demonstrating how to navigate her iPod using keyboard shortcuts. She also went through her mail deleting messages (she's gotten very good at that, and has never asked me to help her unsubscribe from some of the more um...loquacious businesses that she works with). Neala also showed off BARD Mobile and iBooks. Will got to listen to an audiobook on BARD mobile, and he got to hear Siri's rendition of _War and Peace_. To top things off, I showed off Alex, the voice on my iPhone 6+. Alex sounds a bit better than the default voice for Siri (commonly called Samantha), and Alex is the default voice on new Macs. But he is too big for Neala's iPod touch.
On to see what Android can do. Will turned on TalkBack, which started to read things on the screen. The voice is less expressive than Siri, but understandable. He was able to navigate the screen using double-taps & screen swipes, just like IOS. The tap-hold-tap trick on IOS doesn't work in Android though. Here instead of double-tapping on a button to 'press' it, you hold one finger down on the button and tap elsewhere on the screen. Much easier than double-tapping because the location of your tapping finger doesn't matter...anywhere on the screen is fine. This is not well-advertised on IOS but is the preferred way for blind people to double-tap the screen.
After much finicking around with Bluetooth, we got Neala's keyboard working with Will's phone. Her keyboard needed new batteries, which is obvious when you hit on/off button and indicator light fails come on. Except that when the indicator light is off, you can't tell that its there at all! Bad design choice, Apple!
Anyway, the Android home screen is fully navigable using arrow keys (rather than Ctrl-Opt-arrow keys in IOS). Navigation order is strange though. Also, all four arrow keys navigate the screen...in IOS only left & right navigate the screen...Up and Down mainly work the 'rotor'. I suspect the rotor is nice for sophisticated text editing, but Neala has never needed its features. So we neither know nor care if Android has analogous features.
Regarding keyboard navigation on Android, we made the following discoveries:
No way to get to Home screen from inside an app. Ctrl-Opt-H does this on IOS. I note that the Talkback support page lists Shift-Alt-H as the home screen shortcut, but we tried this and failed.
We could launch Chrome or any other app using the Return key (Ctrl-Opt-space on IOS). We couldn't get Chrome to read the screen at all (Ctrl-Opt-B on IOS). I note there is a browser add-on called ChromeVox; perhaps we would need to install this to read Chrome's webpages? The Ctrl-Opt sequence turns off TalkBack, with an optional warning message. I scanned Android keyboard shortcuts...most are app-specific, or for launching specific apps.
Will's conclusion was that many IOS VoiceOver features had no Android equivalents. Google can add them, but it's got a lot of work to do. While he may not know much about Android's capabilities, he's pretty sure that he's not just missing out on some hidden features. | | Sunday, November 16th, 2014 | | 9:19 pm |
The Bane of Usability
Seeing Neala this week came with a sense of urgency. She had been sick the previous week, and so several problems had accumulated that she was stuck on. Little did I know that there was a central theme underlying all these problems... First, she was stuck on the BARD mobile app. It would not read her the list of recently-released audiobooks. She had called the Carnegie Library for the Blind for help, and they tried but couldn't fix things remotely. It would get to the A-Z widget, and then stop reading the screen, as if there was no list of books plainly visible. This was clearly a bug with VoiceOver...not sure if it is specific to the BARD mobile app, or a general problem on Apple's end. Since BARD mobile was designed specifically for blind people. My impression was that CLPGH couldn't reproduce the problem. I didn't know how to fix it, but I did show her several workarounds. The bug prevented her from exploring the screen using the arrow keys. But using VO-B worked just fine. So did going to the bottom of the screen, using Ctrl-Down, and working her way backwards through the list. So does touching the screen (but she hates to do that). In fact, we had had this problem a few weeks ago, (when the keyboard wasn't working) and I had suggested touching the bottom of the screen. Next, she couldn't access her (long) list of books on iBooks. Turns out it had somehow been set to display only PDF's, of which she had none. Easy fix when you can see the screen....not so easy otherwise. I understand Apple's desire to let you view only the PDFs in your book collection. But why have that ability enabled when you have no PDFs at all, Apple? Just hide the feature until they install (or buy) a PDF! Being a connaisseur of the different voices her iPod could use, Neala wanted to hear the Canadian accent. The Settings app has four, count 'em, four different Voice settings: (Siri, VoiceOver, Accessiblity, and one more I can't remember). We told VoiceOver to use Canadian, which VO promptly ignored...it continued using the British male voice, which is Neala's favorite. But the Siri voice setting accepted Canadian English...which was just like American English. No different! Siri did adopt the Aussie accent when we changed it to use Austrailian English. So what's the Canadian setting for if it is just like American, eh? And why does Apple have, or need, four different voice settings? Next, Neala is still having trouble using Siri to dictate email or text mesages. Because Siri often cuts off its responses mid-sentence. Definitely a Siri bug, but how to work around? VO-B can browse the screen. But sometimes, it will read Siri's responses, and sometimes it gives whatever was on the screen before Neala invokes Siri. Another Siri bug. Easily worked around by tapping anywhere on the screen, which Neala hates, and then pressing VO-B to browse the screen and read Siri's response. Now Neala was able to send me test emails and text messages. I think this is the third week we have played with Siri to send emails and texts. Neala is having a hard time learning Siri. But that is because of the bugs and inconsistency Siri displays. Instability is the enemy of usability. I suspect Neala doesn't remember the solutions because I come in not knowing what they are, and have to discover them myself before I can teach them to her. In fact, all the complaints she had this week were due to bugs in Apple's UI...probably to do with VoiceOver. If VoiceOver were as stable and solid as the UI Apple presents to sighted people, she would not have any complaints this week. The final request she had was to try running the CBS app. Freely downloadable, and I guessed that she wanted to watch "The Young and the Restless", as we had tried watching older episodes of that soap on Youtube in weeks gone by. While the app promotes CBS's primetime lineup, it did have TY&TR episodes...todays, as well as the most recent episodes. She was able to start watching Friday's episode. But the accessability is poor...when playing a video, the app doesn't let you stop the video by pressing <Escape>. The buttons on the screen you can press are not visible...maybe that interface was easier to Neala than to me. I don't understand apps that have poor accessability, though I know it is possible. Apple seems to order the buttons in a list so VoiceOver can read them sequentially. Why does iOS allow an app to create a GUI button (or some other item) that isn't available in VoiceOver? Sounds like a design flaw on Apple's part. | | Sunday, November 9th, 2014 | | 9:11 pm |
The Old New Features
So today was the big release of IOS 8.1. Not that it's particularly useful for me. It mainly boasts the new Apple Pay feature, but that won't work on my iProp. But the big news is that it may fix the VoiceOver problems that Neala has been having since we updated her to IOS 8.0. So I made the point of updating as early in the day as possible. That way, when I met up with Neala, I could demo it to her. Hooked up her keyboard to my iPhone to see if her keyboard's VO commands work properly. And they did! This is what Neala gets excited about! The update to 8.0 made her afraid to do more updates; they might break more things. But not this time. She immediately forgot her fear and agreed to update her iPod. And the update made her dreams come true...she can now use the VoiceOver commands on the keyboard. No more having to swipe the screen (she never could get the hang of it). Sigh. It's an amazing feeling again, until you remember that you had all these features in IOS 7. Still, she's got a bit better idea of how to use QuickNav, and how to use the screen. Even if she can't really swing it. I guess she's a bit better off than before IOS 8 then. So...woohoo? Neala then proceeded to give me a laundry list of bugs. That is, things she was unable to do because the machine behaved weirdly. First case was Siri. Neala had tried to get Siri to dictate an email message to me. Neala demonstrated. "Hey, Siri, send an email to David Svoboda". Turns out Siri did exactly what she suggested, but failed to read her the screen contents. So it worked, but she had no way of knowing that. Which means it didn't work. After some experimentation, I learned a few things. The "Hey Siri" feature does work as advertised. That is, you don't have to press any button, you can just lift the iProp to your mouth as you speak. But VO won't read the contents of the screen. I was initially impressed by the Hey Siri feature when I first heard about it. But seeing this behavior, plus its potential for abuse (it will fire anytime anyone nearby says Hey Siri) has dampened my enthusiasm. We turned off Hey Siri for now. This fixed Siri's tendency to not narrate her responses...usually. She does occasionally forget, leaving Neala in the dark about what just happened. The best suggestion I had was to simply say "What?". How do we get Siri to repeat her response if she doesn't say it right the first time? Neala also wondered why Siri sounded like an American female, when she changed the VoiceOver voice to be British male. I knew this one...for some reason Siri and VO are different systems, and can use different voices. I taught her how to switch Siri to use a British male voice, like VO. Even then, Siri uses a different voice. Not quite as nice as the British male VO voice. But still better than American female. Apparently Samantha is the name of the default voice that Siri uses. But I have no idea what is the name of the British voices that Neala prefers. Oh well. Using the keyboard (and especially VO-b, the 'browse the screen' feature), Neala was able to get VO to read any screen that Siri throws at her. And how to get help from Siri. So Neala can learn what kind of messages Siri understands. Which are kind of arbitrary. Siri can read new texts, but not old ones, for example. So Neala and I spent some time exchanging emails and texts using Siri. So Neala should be able to dictate emails now. Or text messages. She's already proficient at using the Mail app to read emails. And she's especially good at deleting them...the spam she gets has given her lots of practice. We did our traditional app store updates. Which were a breeze now that the keyboard works again. Next Neala bug report: she's been reading _War and Peace_ from iBooks. It's an ebook, so the dictation is handled by VoiceOver. Which is not quite as human-sounding as a real audiobook, but it's a reasonable substitute, esp given how many more ebooks there are than audiobooks. Anyway, there are many ways to get VO to read a single page of the book. (VO-space, VO-b, up-down in quicknav mode). But no obvious way to get VO to read all the remaining pages...you have to "turn the page", which involves navigating to a page chooser, selecting next page (down key) and read. Less convenient than turning a physical page, and more jarring...after all VO stops when the end of page is reached with no prior warning. In fact, Neala has asked me this problem before, twice. Each time we figured it out after some monkeying around, and I left her happy, but we then forgot the solution and she asked me again. So on the third time monkeying around, I suggested the two-finger flick down on the screen. This typically does the same screen-reading operaiton as VO-b. But it continues on to the next page...exactly what Neala wants. So no page-turning necessary. Hopefully she and I will remember this trick...are there any other ways to do continuous reading in iBooks? The last thing Neala wanted was to watch the current episode of _Days of our Lives_ on Youtube. I was surprised that she could watch the episode at all, but she insisted that she had watched full DooL episodes on Youtube before. She subscribed to a DooL channel, but that channel only had teasers and snippets...no full episodes. A Youtube search brought up a 35-min episode marked for today, but it was actually Friday's. I suspect she may be out of luck. My guess is that the channel is sanctioned by CBS and shows no episodes, just teasers. The full episodes she catches are posted by random folks and taken down by CBS a few days later, right? I'm always annoyed at Youtube videos going away, but I assumed that's the way the copyright police works. | | Monday, November 3rd, 2014 | | 9:33 pm |
Why am I here?
I have a confession to make. I'm considering quitting this blog. My first few blog posts drew a few comments and likes. I try to post to this blog consistently. But for a few months now, many of my posts generate no comments or likes. One useful suggestion to notify Apple about these posts, which is a good idea if you know who at Apple would be interested. Which I don't. And it is a bit of work to keep doing this blog. Mainly because the best time to write these things is late at night after helping Neala...life would be easier if I could take the next day off work just to write each post. And the last session we had was quite frustrating. Mostly we cursed the bugs Apple still hasn't fixed in the latest IOS, and what workarounds there are are unsatisfactory. Neala regrets upgrading to iOS 8 and promises to be more cautious on further upgrades. Wise, but depressing. But when I left Neala's condo that evening, I bumped into Karen, a friend living in the same building. So we talked for a while, and I made several discoveries. Karen knows Neala, and admires her. Despite her blindness, Neala lives a very independent full life. Always coming and going, Neala gets out of the building more than Karen herself does. And Neala has a decent network of friends to look after her, I'm just one of the newer ones. Karen is very impressed by Neala's capability and independence. Karen remembered Neala's campaign to run for the condo's board of directors, and while Neala lost that campaign, she still inspres Karen. It can be difficult for any person with a comfortable apartment to venture out, let alone one deprived of eyesight. Neala, do you have a purpose in life? Do you know what it is? I'm beginning to suspect your purpose is to inspire those around you. Not by waxing eloquent, or by teaching people, or by writing the Great American Novel. Not by doing anything significant. Just by getting through life. Normal life. Nothing fancy. Oh...except without eyes. Oh yes...and if you know this is your purpose, then you might feel the weight of everyone's eyes on you. Which might make you paranoid. Or narcissistic. So maybe I better not tell you. I don't know what is my purpose in life. But I do know why I teach Neala the Internet. I still believe the Internet is a great source of freedom and equality. With my tutilege, Neala can access the Internet and discover a whole new world....which most of us are still learning about. On the Internet, nobody knows you are blind. And helping Neala learn computers teaches me two things. First, it teaches me how difficult computers still are. Even from the company with a reputation for making them easy, they are still hard. Neala has a talent for finding bugs in iOS or in its apps. And second, because my eyesight is poor, helping Neala is like helping me. She is something of a mirror for me, in that I can see myself in her, in the ways she lives, in the ways she treats others, and especially in the way the world treats her. I don't know what is my purpose in life. And maybe it's better that way. Knowing my purpose might make me paranoid. Or narcissistic. | | Tuesday, October 28th, 2014 | | 10:12 pm |
Still broken
Neala is still having lots of problems, mostly intermittent. While we made progress last week, I'm beginning to feel like we are trying to swim up a waterfall. For instance, Neala complains that VoiceOver is lethargic when it reads the screen. She demonstrated: On the home screen, it responds to her arrow keys, but only after about 3 seconds. The problem eventually 'goes away'. My guess is that the machine was 'groggy' (VO was swapped out, most likely), and that it would be fine once the machine fully woke up. Which seemed to happen after a few seconds. Her BARD mobile app is still stuck on the 'table index' screen. Keyboard won't get past it. But two-finger flick down/up bypasses it. We worked on this last week, but Neala forgot the solution. Grrrr. Also, the BARD mobile website made a recent change...they snuck in a legal disclaimer for Neala to sign. With several pages of legalese. The kind of disclaimer that everyone skips reading and just clicks 'I accept'. How are blind people supposed to skip past CYA legal mumbo-jumbo like sighted people do??? Every time Apple pulls this crap, I take over Neala's iProp and skip it myself. The better question is, why can't Apple's UI experts produce a more friendly way of getting users' acceptance, or of bypassing it altogether??? As a programmer who has been trained from childhood not to foist computer code on non-programmers, I resent lawyers foisting legalese on non-lawyers! Since we have no clue when Apple will fix the VO-keyboard problems, I try to teach Neala how to use the touch screen. Her fingers are clumsy (mostly from arthritis), and she has always avoided touching the screen directly. The touch screen is very sensitive, and she often touches it whenever she picks up the iPod. This is harmless as a single-finger touch in VO only moves the cursor; it doesn't actually perform any action like deleting an email. Annoying but tolerable. Since Neala can't automatically browse the screen using Ctrl-Opt-B like she used to, she can instead flick two fingers up from the bottom of the screen. She's pretty good at it; but it only works well for her when she holds the iPod in her hand. Leaving it on the desk means that her hand flicks past the iPod and whacks her speaker. Plus she has to find the device either to flick it or pick it up. Slow, much slower than just manipulating keys on the keyboard. I took Neala to the VoiceOver practice screen feature (in the Settings app). It does nothing but tell you what gesture you just did on the screen, and what its functionality is (in VoiceOver). We had actually done this when she first got the iPod, but we had abandoned touching the screen in favor of her Bluetooth keyboard. The other feature I really wanted her to learn was how to go to the first item on the screen, or the last one. Browsing the screen (either through Ctrl-Opt-B or a two-finger flick up) starts at the first item. But how to go to the last one? No keyboard shortcut for that. Actually, in QuickNav mode, Ctrl-down did this, but it is broken in IOS8. I had taught her to find the lower-right corner of the screen. Inconvenient because Neala has no idea where the bottom right corner of the visible screen is, so she has to hunt for it. And often the screen may have a long list of items or text, so just waiting until VO reads them all was boring. I was overjoyed to discover a 4-finger single tap on the upper half of the screen takes you to the first item, and a 4-finger single tap on the lower half takes you to the last item. In fact, the four fingers don't have to tap the screen at the same time or on the same half of the screen. As long as you get four fingers on the screen simultaneously and release them within about a second, it counts. And your first finger's location determines whether it goes to the first item or last item. But I couldn't get Neala to do it. Her pinky seems to have a mind of its own, and doesn't play well with her other three fingers. VO kept misinterpreting her attempts as single taps, or two-finger double taps, or split taps (I didn't even know that was a valid gesture; what is it for?). I left that as a homework assignment for her. Maybe AssistiveTouch can help? I also browsed the AppleVis forum, hoping they knew some workaround for the iOS 8 keyboard bugs. No luck. Many on the forums warn to stay on ios7. This is a crying shame! If bugs like these affected sighted people, there would be a mass exodus to Android!On a positive note, Neala mentioned that she had some bad behavior on her iPod last week, which she fixed by rebooting. This breaks off the Bluetooth connections to her speaker and keybaord, so she had to reconnect them. She fixed the speaker by turning it off and on. And she got the keyboard working again after 5 minutes of diddling in the settings. So she's making progress independently; she's a good student! Finally, today I made sure Neala could read iBooks. Its VO access is still confusing. There are several ways to read a single page of text. But Neala wants continuous reading of all pages, until she explicitly stops it. And Only the two-finger down-flick does multi-page reading. Also the Ctrl key is supposed to play/pause VO. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Maybe it just takes a few seconds for it to work...who knows? |
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