Prizmo is made for everyone, and is thus fully compatible with VoiceOver. It provides voice guidance to help position your iPhone when taking document pictures, and will find the text orientation automatically if it’s turned left, right or upside down. Prizmo’s quick capture mode provides a fast path from picture to speech synthesis for an improved workflow, and it provides a high-quality voice reader (individual voices available as in-app purchases).

So far, in our tests, the app works exceptionally well. The user is guided by voice instructions to properly fit the page in the camera’s view, and a series of tones leading up to the snapping of a picture helps to alert the user if their hand is not holding steady. OCR output has been surprisingly accurate, and the conversion works quickly and cleanly. We highly recommend this app!

Thanks to the Prizmo team for making another great OCR option for VoiceOver users.

• Grading Kindle for iOS Accessibility
• Justin Romack’s Kindle for iOS Overview
• Ashes for Feverº
• Nocs
• Zombies, Run!

The Maccessibility Round Table Podcast is sponsored in part by Draconis Entertainment.

★

This app is a real motivator for my exercise regime! I constantly want to get on the bike and run from the Zombies, help complete missions and build my base to build the future from the Zombie apocalypse. This wasn’t entirely true before.

As a blind iPhone user,, who relies on the built in screen reader, VoiceOver, and someone who is determined to get fitter, I was intrigued when I learnt the guys over at Six To Start were working hard on accessibility in the this app. Now blind users can not only complete the missions but we also have access to the base builder. The redesign of the app has made the experience slicker for VoiceOver users and now I can pedal away on the exercise bike, running from the zombies just like everyone else.

The audio interface made this game and health motivator perfect for a blind audience but up until the 2.0 release we didn’t have full access to the entire game components. Thanks to Six To Start, it’s now possible.

My increasing fitness level thanks you Six To Start!

App Store Description

You tie your shoes, put on your headphones, take your first steps outside. You’ve barely covered 100 yards when you hear them. They must be close. You can hear every guttural breath, every rattling groan - they’re everywhere. Zombies. There’s only one thing you can do: Run!

Zombies, Run! is an ultra-immersive running game and audio adventure, co-created with award-winning novelist Naomi Alderman. We deliver the story straight to your headphones through orders and voice recordings - and when you get back home, you use the supplies you’ve collected while running to build and grow your base.

BBC NEWS - “The only way to save yourself is to run for real.”

WIRED - “In the style of Runkeeper, with an exciting undead twist.”

LIFEHACKER - “A really cool way to get outside and exercise.”

CNN - “Turns exercise into a game - a terrifying, terrifying game.”

TIME.COM - “Takes all the fun of a zombie game and funnels it into a fitness app.”

WALK, JOG, OR RUN ANYWHERE

Zombies, Run! works anywhere and at any speed. You can jog in a park, run along a beach, or walk along a trail. It even works on treadmills!

YOU ARE RUNNER 5

Hundreds of lives are counting on you. You’ve got to rebuild your base from a few shivering survivors into a fortified beacon of civilization by collecting critical supplies and avoiding roving zombie hordes. Can you save them and learn the truth about the zombie apocalypse?

A WORLD OF STORIES

You become the hero in an epic story of humanity’s struggle for survival where your running really matters - and there’s a deeper mystery to be uncovered as well… This app includes all 26 missions from Season 1 as well as the first 7 missions from Season 2; and there’ll be a further 60+ Season 2 missions released weekly and available for purchase!

YOUR OWN MIX

Choose your own custom playlists before you start running: the story unfolds in between your tracks through a series of dynamic radio messages and voice recordings.

INTERVAL TRAINING - WITH ZOMBIES

With our optional ‘Zombie Chases’ mode, you’ll need to increase your speed and work up a sweat if you hear zombies on your tail. That’s right - we’ve made interval training fun!

VIEW YOUR RUNS ONLINE WITH ZOMBIELINK Register with our free ZombieLink service to view and share your runs online, complete with maps, full run history, and the ability to ‘play back’ zombie chases so you can see how much faster you ran when the living dead were right behind you! Plus you can sync your runs with Runkeeper and export them as GPX files.

KEEP THE SURVIVORS ALIVE

You automatically collect items like medicine, batteries, and ammo while running - but when you’re back home, who needs them more: the soldiers or the doctors? Which buildings need extra defenses? It’s up to you - and the bigger your base, the more missions you can play.

NOTES

• Requires iOS 6 or above. Works on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPod Touch 4th gen and 5th gen.
• Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.
• Accelerometer mode can dramatically decrease battery life.

• Australian Dollar
• Bahraini Dinar
• Brazilian Real
• Belarusian Ruble
• British Pound (including new 50 Pound note)
• Canadian Dollar (including new 20, 50 & 100 notes)
• Euro
• Hungarian Forint
• Israeli Shekel
• Indian Rupee
• Japanese Yen
• Kuwaiti Dinar
• Mexican Peso
• New Zealand Dollar
• Polish Zloty
• Russian Ruble
• Saudi Arabian Riyal
• Singapore Dollar
• United Arab Emirates Dirham
• United States Dollar

From the release notes:

• 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.

We have not yet had a chance to test the accessibility, but this is an extremely welcome development, after years of waiting. Hopefully, this is a sign that Amazon will be more responsive in keeping their apps accessible going forward.

The Maccessibility Round Table Podcast is sponsored in part by Draconis Entertainment, with accessible games for Mac OS X and Windows.

• Darcy’s Picks
  • “Markdown” by David Sparks and Eddie Smith
  • LaunchBar
• John’s Picks
  • Talking Goggles
  • Voice Dream Reader
• Holly’s Picks
  • Robo-E
  • Song Guru
• Josh’s Picks
  • Twitterific 5
  • Markdown Service Tools
  • Incomparable Radio Theater of the Air
• Eric’s Picks
  • Songza
  • Dominos Pizza USA
• Kevin’s Picks
  • Audio Bus
  • Amp Kit
  • Touch Tunes

Thanks to Draconis Entertainment for sponsoring the Maccessibility Round Table Podcast!

But first I’ve got bad news for people looking forward to the full VoiceOver support that we promised on iOS for Zombies, Run! 2 - it will not be available in tomorrow’s update. Instead, we will be making good on our commitment for full VoiceOver support in version 2.1, which we will release AS SOON AS POSSIBLE after April 16th. If you depend on VoiceOver to play the game, you should hold off on updating until 2.1 is out, when we will have made the game fully accessible.

If only all developers were this communicative! While this is a disappointment to many, the rest of this piece contains a lot of good information about why there was this delay. The good news is that it sounds like they’ve already finished the VoiceOver support, and will be submitting the update to Apple immediately. Hopefully, this will mean version 2.1 will be available for VoiceOver users very soon.

If you’re a fan of this game and rely on VoiceOver, this post is definitely worth reading.

★

Today we released a minor update to Infovox iVox. This update solves a couple of small issues, including:

• Distorted speech after switching between Apple and Acapela voices. *Interruption of demo mode.
• Incompatibility with Mac OS X 10.4.11.
• Incompatibility with Kurtzweil 3000.

In addition, we can confirm this also fixes the problem with Acapela voices in games by Draconis Entertainment, and likely several other third-party software developers whose products rely on the system voice settings.

★

• Reading Device — Marco Arment
• You Can’t Quit, I Dare You — Ben Brooks
• DiceWorld
• Type2Phone

If you’re using an iPad, must you be reading during taxi, takeoff, and landing instead of watching a movie or playing Super Stickman Golf 2? Am I allowed to listen to Phish in my headphones while I’m reading? If not, are audiobooks or screen-readers allowed, or are we discriminating against the visually impaired?

This entire piece really hammers home the problems with drawing distinctions between the types of devices we have now, and what we do or the types of media we consume with them. We’re back to the same old question: “Are iPads computers?”

In either case, specifying reading consumption does indeed pose some serious accessibility questions, as Marco rightly points out. And, unless you’re blasting audio through your earbuds, how would anyone know if someone is listening to the latest Stephen King novel or the latest Dido record? Who cares? Even if exceptions were made, are flight attendants going to be expected to police visually impaired travelers’ devices to make sure what they are actually listening to is textual? This is a bizarre and ill-conceived distinction.

★

• Word Letter
• Word Puzzles with Pals

Our previous web host had declined in reliability and customer service to a deplorable degree, and so Maccessibility and its sister sites are in the process of relocating to GreenGeeks. We have, so far, found their support to be superb. As an added bonus, GreenGeeks is an eco-friendly web hosting solution, which will reduce the environmental impact of our site. This is something we are very excited about.

Thanks for your patience through this transition. A new episode of the Maccessibility Round Table Podcast has been recorded, and we hope to be delivering it to you soon as well.

• VoiceOver Tutorial from Looktel
• Demo of Inquisitor
• Podcast about the BARD iOS app
• See Eye GPS
• Demo of Letter Clever

Our next podcast will be streamed on Thursday, 14/March, at 12:00 PM EDT, 9:00 AM PDT. It will be our Q&A show. TO submit a question to our knights, interact with us on Twitter with the #VOLive hashtag, or email us at ask@maccessibility.net.

Samsung has suffered a setback in its effort to win an iPhone ban based on a function making its software accessible to blind people.

The South Korean firm had sought an injunction in a German court arguing Apple’s VoiceOver screen-access facility infringed one of its patents.

This article is definitely worth a read. It speaks volumes about Samsung’s character, (or lack thereof), demonstrating just how low they will sink to score a point or two over Apple. If their questionable tactics weren’t suspect before, I think they certainly are now. Might be time for the folks in South Korea to hire some new faces in PR.

★

• Prizmo 2
• MultiMarkdown Composer 2

Regardless of whether you use the graphics view or the schematic view, you’re playing the same game. Initially we thought that the accessible version of the base builder might simply show a list of buildings in your base, rather than a map.

But that created a problem - how do we convey to the user that they can’t build a building because they’ve run out of space? And even if there is enough space, how do we explain that the building is the wrong shape for it? We considered throwing out the “space management” aspect of the accessible base builder entirely.

Ultimately we realised this was stupid. Why should we make the game simpler just because the interface needs to be accessible? Why should we deprive people the fun of cramming their buildings together into the most efficient possible layout? We discarded the list idea and implemented a proper map instead.

A game for everybody

Given that Zombies, Run! is at its heart an aural experience, it is one of our highest priorities to make the game fully accessible to all of our players, be they sighted or visually impaired. We are delighted that this will be possible on iOS from day one, and are working hard to bring the same accessibility to Android as soon as possible.

★

We have always seen our keyboard as a universal technology, and as something that can help millions of users be more productive in their daily lives. We are today very happy to see that we are well on track on this mission, and we are working hard to integrate our technology in the next generation of hardware and software to come.

We realize that a good virtual keyboard is something users expect to be integrated on their device and be available in every application. This is by far the biggest request from our iOS users, and one that we can unfortunately not provide until each platform we target supports such functionality.

In our effort to bring Happy Typing to even more users, what we can do is make Fleksy on iOS free for everyone. We feel that making Fleksy part of the daily lives of many more people will help us continue to showcase how smartphones can be made both more accessible and useful for everyone.

I find the wording of these paragraphs curious. The specificity of “next generation” hardware and software seems like an odd choice of phrasing. I have no inside information whatsoever, but one has to wonder if the fact that the app is going free, coupled with the wording above hints at something else in the works. Could there be a built-in Fleksy keyboard in a future release of iOS? I have no idea…but time will tell.

★

In our tests, the OCR rendered was very accurate, and the application is easy to use. It allows importing of images, PDF’s, or direct scanning or picture taking within the app itself, along with many other useful features. Among its accessibility features are the ability to warn the user if an image is blurry, and various progress and status messages.

For the next day or two, the app will be available in the Mac App Store for $24.99 USD, which is 50% off of its typical $49.99. At either price tag, the app is far more affordable than other options, such as DocuScan Plus or Abbyy Finereader.