iPhone 3G S, The world’s most accessible smart phone
Today Apple upgraded the iPhone and made it the most accessible phone. As I had predicted in an earlier post, with more capable hardware they were able to improve accessibility. Apple gets it, they see accisibility not as a hindrance, but as a way to create a competitive advantage.
Voice Over, speak it to me
With Voice Over anyone can now control the iPhone without needing to see the screen. Gestures are used to move around and the entire OS is opened up to the blind:
You’ll hear descriptions of every item on the screen, including status information such as battery level, Wi-Fi and cellular network signal levels, the cellular network provider, and time of day. It even lets you know when the display changes to landscape or portrait orientation, and when the screen is locked or unlocked.
VoiceOver includes built-in voices that speak 21 languages including Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Dutch, English (US), English (UK), Finnish, French (Canada), French (France), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), and Swedish.
This feature also allows a blind person to interact with a sighted person by displaying a Voice Over cursor which displays a rectangle around the item being described and the screen can be turned off for privacy. The Voice Over feature could be great for a sighted person as well. You can control the iPhone without taking it out of your pocket and you can probably extend battery life by not having the LCD on.
I am not sure how typing is handled (probably by selecting each letter at a time with the gestures), but Voice Over is a real win for the iPhone.Voice Control, do as I say
Another feature that makes the new iPhone more accessible is Voice Control. Apple prominently showcased this feature during the keynote announcement of the iPhone as one that has mass appeal, but here is another feature which helps the disabled by allowing dialing and music selection via voice commands. It also supports 21 Languages.
you can use your voice to play music and make a phone call. Just press and hold the home button, listen for the audio prompt, and speak the name of the artist, album, or playlist you want to hear. You can pause, play, change tracks, even shuffle your music.
Zoom Zoom Zoom
The iPhone 3G S now lets you magnify the screen of any application on the iPhone. Not only does this help those who traditionally need magnification, but Baby Boomers with poor eye sight now have an option for an accessible smart phone.
Zoom works everywhere, including the Home, Unlock, and Spotlight screens—even with applications you purchase from the App store.
And there’s more…
These are just a few of the accessibility features of the iPhone , but these are ones which potentially have uses outside the disabled community. It is clear that Apple is motivated to create accessible products, but by addressing this need, it also opens up the possibility to market these features outside the disabled community.
Be sure to check out Apple’s iPhone accessibility page for more information of solutions for the hearing impaired and those with physical and motor skills difficulties.
Apple embraces accessibility and helps everyone in the process
Most people don’t know that Macs are by default the most “off-the-shelf” accessible computers sold today. Every single Mac comes with accessibility features for the physical and motor skills, hearing, and vision impaired. This means that a blind person can walk into any Apple store and use any computer without installing any software. They can even carry all their settings on a USB drive so that their customization can travel with them. On Windows computers these features need to be purchased separately from third parties and as such lack the level of refinement and availability of the Apple solution.
Since 2002 Apple has been investing on accessibility on the Mac platform, but in the last year it has been taking steps to make it’s other products namely iTunes and iPods more accessible to the blind.
Today Apple demonstrated how a company can use accessibility to it’s advantage. By integrating Voice Over into the latest iPod shuffle not only did they make the product accessible to the blind, they made it accessible to everyone. Since the shuffle has no screen the product has always been marketed as one where the listener has little control of the listening experience, hence the Shuffle name. Now that the device has Voice Over a listener can select a specific play list allowing them to customize their experience to their current mood.
Making Macs accessible led to making iPod Nanos accessible. This work led to Voice Over in the new iPod Shuffles giving Apple another competitive advantage. A short sighted company would not invest in this feature for a product line where they already own the market. But at Apple this work will not be limited to the iPod line. I am sure this trend will continue at Apple because it makes sense. The iPod “experiment” is just baby steps.
Currently the iPhone is the least accessible device they make, but think of what text-to speech can do for Apple. Imagine your phone reading your RSS feeds and email while you drive to work or speaking the name of the caller so that you don’t need to take your eyes off the road? The iPods currently don’t have enough processing power to actually generate the speech real time, Apple actually does the work on the computer prior to loading the music on the device, hence the different voices depending on whether the iPod was synced on a PC or a MAc. However, the iPone’s CPU is a lot more capable and the next version will be even more so allowing Apple to explore these capabilities on the device.
Apple, unlike Amazon and the Author’s Guild, today demonstrated how a company can embrace accessibility and not only help those in need, but improve its product along the way.
Here is a video of the new iPod Shuffle in action. (Quicktime Required). More info can be found on the Shuffle page.
Amazon caves on text-to-speech, a loss for accessibility
On my previous post I mentioned how the Author’s Guild was putting pressure on Amazon due to the inclusion of the text-to-speech feature in the new Kindle. Amazon eventually backed down and is now allowing publishers to disable this feature on a per book basis.
This is too bad because not only did the industry not realize the opportunity they failed to capitalize on, but it also means that people who could benefit from this technology, namely the blind and visually impaired, also suffer.
As I mentioned before, no one who can read by sight would choose text-to-speech for their book consumption. Not only is it slower to have something read aloud, but it is also not the best experience.
The following article on Slate is among the dozens which outline how poor text-to-speech really is and gets into detail on the technology and the fact that replacing human actors in audio books is still very far away.
Why computer voices still dont sound human. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine
Hopefully the industry won’t enforce the option to disable text-to-speech on their books because the only ones who would be hurt are the ones with no other options.
Capitalizing on accessibility, the Authors Guild is out of touch
Today I read a post on TechCrunch about an op-ed piece on the New York Times by Roy Blount, Jr of the Authors Guild. Mr. Blount argues that the text-to-speech feature of the Kindle is infringing on his industry because even though Kindle owners pay to download the text version of a book, they do not pay for the audio rights. Typically audio rights are paid for audio versions of the book read aloud by humans. He goes on to say that computer voices are getting so good that they will eventually be indistinguishable from humans.
This all sounds to me like another industry fighting technology to maintain a monopolistic hold to try to extract profit for individuals at every opportunity. If a person purchases a printed book and later the audio version of that book, do they get some sort of refund for owning the same work twice? Why is the inverse so reasonable then? When I was at USC I was once told by a music executive that a music CD only gave you the right to listen to the music from that CD, not the right to transfer it to another device. In essence he was saying I should have to pay them multiple times for the same content. Why did this make sense to the guy? Because in the past this is what the industry has lived by. Get customers to build a library in one format and then purchase it again when a new format comes along, Vinyl -> cassette -> CD -> digital (end of the road). The issue here is a flawed business model which in the past was able to extract more profit from the release of new technology. I still remember how angry I was when I learned how much more CDs cost relative to cassettes. We never saw a price decrease for music CDs even though they were cheaper to produce.
The real issue with text-to-speech…
By adding text-to-speech Amazon is not “infringing” on the book industry. They are opening up a world of information to the blind and visually impaired. Newspapers and magazines can now be consumed by this segment of the population the same day they are available to sighted individuals. Mr. Blount points to the National Federation of the Blind taking offense to his stance, but they have every right. Where has the Author’s Guild been when the blind and visually impaired could not access newspapers? Did they make their professionally recorded audiobooks available to these individuals? Did they help the Library of Congress or Recordings for the Blind by allowing them to distribute their books on standard CD, DVDs or Downloads which could be played on an ipod? The short answer is no. From the Recordings for the Blind website:
RFB&D now offers AudioAccessSM, which enables downloading of audio textbooks from the Internet for playback on either a Windows computer or a Windows–compatible portable media player. RFB&D’s AudioPlus® digitally recorded textbooks are stored on CDs, which hold more than 40 hours each of recorded materials.
In order to play RFB&D digitally recorded textbooks, you will need to use specially adapted CD players or software
The National Library Service for the Blind has the following:
Books and magazines loaned free by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress, are available in recorded format on audiocassette. Cassette recordings require specially designed playback equipment (see Part I), which is loaned free to eligible individuals and institutions. Special accessories (see Part II ) are also loaned free. Cassette machines play at either 15/16 inches per second (ips) or the commercial standard 1-7/8 ips.
The above 2 services basically say that if you are blind or visually impaired there is no simple way for you to read a book. You need special Windows only players, big cassette players, or special CD players to consume books. This industry does not have a vested interest in solving accessibility issues, but they are quick to denounce a tool that could help those who are most in need.
Anyone who has ever used text-to-speech know that it is not the fastest or most enjoyable way to read. Most people use the technology because of a need, not as a superior replacement for visually reading text.
Publishers should be helping the blind…
Instead of condemning Amazon for the text to speech technology in the Kindle, the industry should be complaining because Amazon didn’t go far enough. They should make the device more accessible by making menu navigation text enabled so that the blind could better use the device. Apple has been making great strives in this area by making OS X very accessible with technologies like Voice Over and making iPod menu speech enabled, but more can be done in this area.
What some companies miss is that accessibility isn’t just about helping people, it makes business sense. Text-to-speech does not take money out of author’s pockets, it adds to the bottom line because a whole new segment of the market can now purchase their content. This is synonymous to closed-captioning which makes TV shows accessible to the deaf thus increasing the number of people an ad can reach.
A new era…
Target is in the process of settling a case filed against them by the NFB with regards to Target’s formerly inaccessible website. Instead of capitalizing on a market segment which is in more need of online purchasing due to transportation limitations, Target locked those potential customers out.
The web and digital media is for the first time giving hope to millions of Americans which in the past could not get accessible books for pleasure or education. Today these individuals can’t get access to college books because they change so often it is impossible for organizations to keep up with transcription to Braille or audio. I would bet these individuals would pay for an accessible version of a text book were it available. The Author’s Guild should work on capitalizing on this market instead of trying to close the door for these individuals.
Just like TV executives will not be able to stop the progress of internet TV, the publishing industry will not be able to stop text-to-speech. It’s already on every Mac. Don’t fight progress, figure out how to capitalize on it.