By Shelly Brisbin

May 12, 2023 2:42 PM PT

By Shelly Brisbin

February 8, 2023 9:30 AM PT

Checking in on the accessibility of the Dynamic Island

Every hardware innovation from Apple brings some version of this question to my mind: “Yeah, but how does it work with VoiceOver?” Or any other relevant accessibility tool, for that matter. Before I got my hands on them, I asked this question about Apple Watch, Apple TV, and even the MacBook Pro’s touch bar. And as part of my ongoing adventure in documenting everything the iOS platform offers for accessibility, I needed to pay a visit to the iPhone Pro’s Dynamic Island.

The island is an interface that also hides Face ID and the front-facing camera. You’re meant to interact with the pill-shaped space visually, glancing at it to unlock the phone, or to gather tiny bits of information about what’s going on in a supported app.

Now, being visual doesn’t make an iOS feature inaccessible. Far from it. But it raises questions for the accessibility nerd about how information will be delivered to to a non-visual user, and what gestures are needed to get and control it. Most times, it’s extremely straightforward — notifications can be read by the VoiceOver screen reader, and they can be interpreted by other accessibility tools, too. You can have VoiceOver speak the notifications if you want. (I do not want, by the way.)

But my curiosity about the Dynamic Island centered on the seemingly incidental nature of the data offered – the status of a phone call, duration of a timer, or what song Music is playing. It’s not necessarily a notification, meant to capture your attention. And even if Dynamic Island could give up its secrets to VoiceOver, would the user get anything from it they couldn’t find elsewhere? Can a VoiceOver user save taps and swipes with Dynamic Island the way a non-VoiceOver user can? Is Dynamic Island a selling point for the Pro phones if you’re blind?

Is it, or isn’t it?

First of all, the Dynamic Island is accessible. If an app puts content there, VoiceOver will be able to read/speak it. The screen reader does not announce that there’s currently information on the Dynamic Island, a la notifications. But you can flick through the status bar or explore by touch – essentially, drag your finger in the general vicinity of the island until you hear its contents spoken. When you encounter Dynamic Island with VoiceOver on, it’s selected, just like any other screen element. That means you can double-tap (the VoiceOver equivalent of a single-tap) to open the current host app, or use a double-tap-and-hold or a rotor action to expand the island’s display. Either is the equivalent of a standard long press. The rotor also includes Activate and Dismiss actions, to open the app or empty the island’s contents.

Expanding the Dynamic Island gives VoiceOver access to whatever control the current app provides. Adjust volume in Music, mute your mic during a phone call, switch to the Remote app while AirPlaying to an Apple TV. Just as in any app, the controls are accessible to VoiceOver with a double-tap, and you can collapse the display again by double-tapping outside it.

Flexible little pill

I set a lot of timers: sometimes it’s my sandwich in the toaster oven. Or maybe I’m reading a script aloud and need to know how long it took. An active timer’s countdown appears in the island. Just pass your finger over the pill to have VoiceOver read the display.

If something else, like Music, is already displaying data there, a timer button appears in a space of its own, to the right of the main Dynamic Island. Visually, the timer button updates with a visual representation of how much time remains. To access the countdown with VoiceOver, you’ll need to expand the timer. It would be great to have VoiceOver read time remaining when I flick to the unexpanded timer button.

There’s one way in which the Dynamic Island experience with VoiceOver is superior: If you’re listening to audio, whether from Music, Spotify, Overcasts, Audible, or another supported app, swiping into the island causes VoiceOver to read the track and artist. Visually, there’s only a tiny album art thumbnail at one end, and a pulsing waveform indicator on the right, that tells you something’s playing.

Island on the go

Maps has a few Dynamic Island tricks. Just as the app will display a card if you’re not in the Maps app as you navigate, Dynamic Island delivers tiny status updates instead, including arrows indicating turn direction and distance. VoiceOver speaks these, just as it does when cards appear onscreen. If you expand the island’s contents, you can even end a route immediately. This is a real time-saver over returning to Maps, pulling up the card and choosing the End Route command.

More and more third-party apps offer Dynamic Island support. For a busy traveler using VoiceOver, FlightAware’s updates save both time and lots of flicks and taps. If I were a baseball fan, I’d want my scores flashed atop my phone screen, once again saving me the trouble of digging into the app that provides them.

Though Dynamic Island might not be enough of a justification on its own for some people to splurge on an iPhone Pro, it’s not only well-implemented for VoiceOver, but occasionally provides info more quickly than a host app can.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By Shelly Brisbin

November 11, 2022 2:43 PM PT

By Shelly Brisbin

September 21, 2022 5:10 PM PT

By Shelly Brisbin

April 7, 2022 3:12 PM PT

When in doubt, push the button

​Among a group of my friends and fellow podcasters, a certain kitchen gadget is known simply as the “cult device.” We enjoy the Instant Pot, but are far too cool to openly admire a mere hunk of metal and circuitry… that was not made by Apple.

In my corner of the tech-creative world, there is another cult device – Elgato’s line of Stream Deck products. Perhaps you’ve heard of them!

You may also have heard that fans of the Stream Deck tend to start small with the six-button Stream Deck Mini, later palming that little fellow off on a new convert, moving up to a model with 15 or 32 buttons. For awhile, there was a brisk trade in these things among my extended circle. I purchased a Mini.

Continue reading “When in doubt, push the button”…

By Shelly Brisbin

February 16, 2022 3:43 PM PT

How (and why) I publish a book every summer

Each year when Apple’s WWDC wraps up, I find myself doing what a lot of app developers do: planning my response to the upcoming version of iOS. But my summers aren’t consumed by Xcode or SwiftUI. My annual contribution to the Apple economy is a book called iOS Access for All: Your Comprehensive Guide to Accessibility for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. You think that title’s long? The iOS 15 edition weighs in at 215,000 words, 11 chapters, and four appendices—all written, assembled and sold by me.

Realizing I’d just published the book’s ninth edition got me thinking about how this all happened, and the extent to which I’ve managed to streamline many parts of the publishing process, while hopefully living up to the expectations of a group of readers who don’t get much attention from other iOS books and overviews.

Beginnings

Before I focused on iOS or accessibility, I wrote books about the Mac, web development, and wireless networking. I worked with book publishers whose end products were heavy, paper volumes you could find on a bookstore shelf. Even in 2012, when I first had an idea for a book about accessibility on Apple platforms, I knew the publishing model I had worked under for 10 years or so had changed dramatically. Who needs Mac Answers when you have Google?

I learned soon after iOS became accessible in 2009 that good search craft can’t find what isn’t online. Lots of knowledge about how to use Apple’s accessibility tools was ephemeral. And what was available quickly went out of date with no one having the incentives or a mandate to fix it.

I decided there should be a book about iOS accessibility, written by an experienced tech author. So, as you do, I pitched some publishers. But despite my track record and an opportunity to own a corner of the market, the answer was no. These publishers didn’t think they could sell enough copies of a book focused solely on accessibility.

It’s possible they were entirely right. But as I started embedding myself into the accessibility community, I became aware that publishers really didn’t know who might want the book I planned to write, or how to sell it to them. At least I had the advantage of being a daily user of some of what I planned to write about. I learned a lot by listening – over coffee and on Twitter – to people who make and use accessible tech every day. They reinforced in me the need to make the book, even if I couldn’t yet prove a market existed.

Self-publishing

The other thing you need to know about my plan to publish a book on my own is that I was on a budget. I would need to spend as little money as possible while still doing a professional job. I was a freelancer planning to devote months of full-time work to this endeavor. And I knew I would need to pay for things like a cover design and a copy editor. I also gave myself a travel budget, but not one for software.

At the last couple of Macworld Expos, I sat in on ebook publishing sessions, where I learned the gospel of ePub as a flexible online format that Apple was already using in what was then the iBooks Store. And from accessibility experts, I learned that it was an important part of special-purpose devices that turn text into audio for blind users.

Coming into the 2013 iOS release cycle, I had a topic, a format and publishing strategy, and a foothold in a community I would need to sell the book.

Maximum Accessibility

A major advantage of ebooks over paper ones is that they’re accessible on devices, where screen readers and text visibility options break down the barriers between readers and content. And you’ll find free ePub readers on all platforms.

As a book builder, ePub turned out to be a great choice, There are lots ways you can build a good-looking ePub. Structurally, an ePub is just a bunch of XHTML files, images, CSS, and a manifest, all zipped together.

A brief flirtation with Pages taught me that using an app that was easy to write in would not yield the book I wanted. (Pages support for ePub improved considerably once Apple discontinued iBooks Author, but it’s still not beefy enough for my needs.) Nor did I choose the popular Scrivener, or the expensive inDesign, both of which will export fine ePubs, and in which many of my writer friends have boundless faith. Ditto Calibre and Sigil, which at least appealed to my desire to think of the book as a giant ball of text.

The way I published the iOS 7 version of the book and the way I do it today are remarkably similar. I work in BBEdit on the Mac, and Textastic on the iPad, then I run ancient AppleScripts that verify the book against the ePub specification, and finally put the files together as a book. Building my book this way is a little like compiling a program. A big part of the editing process is debugging it.

Learning to Ask for the Sale

To promote the book, I became a regular at accessibility tech conferences, bought party sponsorships and tables on trade show floors (these were less costly than they might sound). I even had gimmicks, like business cards with QR code stickers on the back that were easy to scan, even if you couldn’t see them.

I used Twitter extensively, and embarked on a podcast book tour – going on any show that would have me to hawk the book. And you know what? People did have me on their shows – there seemed to be real enthusiasm for what I had made.

Acquired Wisdom

Every couple of years I re-examine my publishing process. I’ve made refinements, like adding shortcuts that help me frame and size screenshots. And because there’s demand for a PDF version, I now build an accessible one based on a Microsoft Word template.

At this point, iOS and the book itself are mature propositions. Like the rest of the software, the accessibility tools in iOS have gained incremental updates each year, but the fundamentals remain, meaning not everyone needs either a new phone or a new book each year.

But people do keep buying it and telling me how valuable it has been to them. So chances are pretty good there will be a tenth edition sometime late this fall.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By Shelly Brisbin

January 6, 2022 3:13 PM PT

TV for Picky Eaters

I’ve noticed that folks who write about cord-cutting tend to be maximalists: “How can I get the most of all the things available?” Fair enough. A lot of people like lots of TV.

But I am not them. I am but a humble fan of classic moves with a less-than-12-hours-per-week TV habit. I’m also budget-minded, which some people might call “cheap.” Since we cut the cord a few years ago, I’ve simply done without access to TV, outside of streaming services. But recently, I’ve been on a journey to figure out how I can get the TV morsels I want, at a reasonable cost.

What I care about is the back catalog—classic movies, arthouse fare, restorations, and the odd vintage TV show. And live news. In that last interest, I’m not alone. Live news and sports are big reasons people stick to cable, or add an over-the-top service to their lives. The leading provider of classic movies is Turner Classic Movies (TCM). It’s not simply that TCM plays films from the 30s forward, but that what you find there is often not available on streaming services, or even on physical media. I dig both the volume and the rarity of what TCM does.

What I Really Really Want

In December, I decided to pull the trigger on an over-the-top service. I had two primary TV goals: bring TCM back into my house, and keep monthly subscription costs below the approximately $90 a cable subscription would have set me back.

And so, I limited my search (Suppose is Jason’s go-to tool for this) to services that offered TCM. You can get the channel is as part of YouTube TV, Hulu Live, DIRECTV Stream, and Sling TV. The first three will sell you a big collection of channels, including TCM, for between $65 and $70 per month. So far, their advantage over a cable subscription – for my purposes – is the ability to watch on lots of platforms. They do each offer local channels, which is a nice bonus.

Sling TV is another kettle of fish, and the one I ended up choosing. Like the others, Sling gives you a fixed basket of channels plus add-on channels, plus DVR. My package, including TCM, costs $45 per month. Here’s how I did it.

To get Sling, you must either buy Sling Orange, promising 30+ channels, or Sling Blue with 40+. There is some overlap, but Orange has more sports and Blue, more news. Each package is $35, or you can buy the lot for $50. I picked Sling Blue, and along with news, I got lifestyle and some movie-focused channels. But not TCM. It’s not part of Sling Orange or Blue—but you can add it with the $6 per-month Hollywood Extra package. I also got FXM, CinéMoi, the Sundance Channel and six more movie-focused offerings.

But here’s the thing: I got way more than that, both in the base package and the Hollywood extra. My channel guide lists 130+ channels, including dreadful single-franchise wastes of space, but also delightful surprises like the Film Detective, Heroes & Icons, Shout Factory and lots more.

All this for $41 per month, leaving plenty of headroom if I decide I’d like the 200-hour cloud DVR instead of the free 50-hour one, or if I want to add other special-interest channel packs. A podcast I’ve been doing lately has gotten me interested in Hallmark romance movies, for instance.

One downside of Sling is that access to local channels is limited. I’ve got exactly one.

Eye of the Beholder

I’ve loaded Sling onto my Roku box, Apple TV and iOS devices, and added the Tizen-native app on my Samsung TV. With the Blue package, I can watch live TV on up to three simultaneous screens—which is plenty in our two-person household.

I don’t have any option to create profiles for family members. If I had kids, or a spouse who liked to watch motocross and cooking shows, I might be pretty unhappy about that. You can set parental controls, which are locked down by creating a PIN that’s needed to access specific channels or programs with content ratings you want to lock kids out of.

I find Sling’s interface cluttered and busy. You can’t choose which rows of content to show or hide. The Spotlight row, Recommended for You row, and Trending Live row, are all mixed up with my favorites and DVR content. I’m not a fan of algorithmic TV recommendations. Just give me the channels I’ve favorited and the shows I’ve recorded! Or give me a choice to hide recommendations.

That interface is rendered slightly differently on various operating systems. For example, on my old Roku system, I can filter channels by category, filter by favorites, list them alphabetically, or switch from a grid to a row of thumbnails. Those options don’t appear on the Apple TV version.

Not So Accessible

The Sling apps for Apple TV, Samsung Tizen, Roku and iOS work with each operating system’s screen reader features, speaking the interface and content labels aloud. That’s not a given with TV apps, many of which ignore OS accessibility altogether.

Visually, there’s not much you can do to customize the Sling apps. The gray background provides good contrast with the images and white screen text, but there’s no option to change those colors or increase text size, even on the Apple TV, which provides native support for larger text. Sling not only supports closed captioning, as you’d expect, but has a slew of options for customizing the color and style of text.

Can I Keep It?

I have really, really missed TCM. Getting my movie comfort food via Sling is affordable and flexible. Still, the small amount of time I spend watching each week might tempt me to save the $40 monthly.

It’s the quirky surprises, like the Film Detective channel, and serendipitous encounters with more modern movies that tip the scales in favor of staying subscribed. For now.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By Shelly Brisbin

December 7, 2021 1:46 PM PT

All along the WashTower

Around my house, 2021 has been a year of durable goods upheaval. The 10-year-old refrigerator gave us a scare, the 14-year-old Prius put us on notice that its battery was soon to need replacing, and the 20-year-old washer/dryer just plain gave out.

So, as supply chain bottlenecks continue to make this a terrible time to be buying a car or major appliance, my spouse and I have been in repair and product research mode for months. The upside is that any replacement machine we buy is bound to bring better technology to our lives.

We’d just like to space it all out a bit, please.

It helps that I’m married to a person capable of hacking or fixing most machines—the fridge and the car are copacetic right now. But the old washer/dryer’s ills proved too much, even for him. Last month, we took delivery of a Wi-Fi-enabled, app-controllable LG WashTower—a washer/dryer unit that fits snugly into a narrow, low space in our utility room, and promises a “smart” laundry experience, from recommending settings based on the kind of clothes you put into it, to sending you a notification when your sheets are done. I’ll confess right now that the two nerds in this house have had a lot of fun doing laundry these past few weeks.

The hardware

The WashTower is a one-piece front-loading unit that entered the market to some hype earlier this year, and it was among the few options that would fit in our utility room. Despite that pesky old supply chain, we got ours delivered within a week of spotting it at a local Home Depot.

The all-LCD control panel is in the middle, between the washer and dryer tubs. The display is extremely easy to read, and aside from some icons whose meanings are a little obscure at first, setting up and running the machine is straightforward, with lots of presets for common laundry loads, and the promise that the machine can use the weight, and even the texture of fabrics, to recommend the best settings.

The machine feels solid, and the doors close with a satisfying thunk. There’s a soap and fabric softener dispenser drawer above the washer unit and the tubs light up when it’s time to take out your clothes. The tinkly alert sounds it plays remind me more of my rice cooker than the harsh buzz of my mom’s old top-loader. The whole affect is sturdy, modern and sleek.

The LG ThinQ app

LG sells lots of smart devices, from dishwashers and thermostats to TVs and microwaves – all of them use the same app, called LG ThinQ. Though the app can control a range of gadgets, the screenshots I’ve seen of the TV interface, for example, give the impression that LG is smart about building interfaces that match what you’re doing, rather than trying to force all devices to awkwardly share a few similar screens. Though simple, ThinQ’s WashTower interface feels as though it’s designed just for managing laundry machines.

Like a lot of network-enabled devices, you connect your phone to the WashTower’s own Wi-Fi network for initial setup, then move the machine to your network, after which you to connect to it from any device running the app. My first stab at setup was a little rough – the WashTower kept disconnecting from our network when we turned it off. So I rebooted the Wi-Fi router, turned on the WashTower again and reinstalled and reconnected the app. We haven’t had any connection issues in several weeks.¹ I can even turn each unit on remotely.²

From the app, I can also choose wash and dry cycles, view their status and ETA, and get a notification³ – there’s only one – when a load is done. Unfortunately, that notification doesn’t specify which function is finished.⁴ When a dryer load is done, I want to remove and fold the clothes quickly to avoid wrinkling. When the washer finishes first, there’s less reason to take scurry to the other end of the house, especially if the dryer’s still running. The single notification means I’ve got to open the app to see what’s going on.

Of course, you don’t need to wait for a notification to check on your laundry. You can use the app to find out what the unit is doing at any point, and how long the current cycle has to run. You can pause or stop the machine if you like, too.

When starting a load of laundry, you can use the app to do just about anything you can do on the unit’s LCD display: choose the type of load, desired temperature, rate of spin and rinse time, or just use one of the many presets. There’s also a “Download” preset that you can set to one of a large number of additional presets listed in the app. (You can tag favorite cycle types, including both built-in and downloadable ones—but confusingly, you can only download one at a time.)

Outsmarting the appliance

One drawback to a machine that thinks it’s smart enough to guess what settings your laundry needs is that it’s not always easy to understand what the WashTower is doing or why. When we first got the unit, everything we washed using presets was done in hot water, even in the rinse stage. That’s not what we wanted.

We sabotaged another WashTower feature, at least a little bit. When you wash a load of laundry, the dryer picks up the washer settings you used and offers them up when you press the dryer’s power button. That’s great, except that we often double up, drying the two most recent wash loads together.

Instead of randomly pairing blue things and brown things because the small loads are about the same size, I’m now starting to think more about which pairs of loads will dry best together on the same WashTower settings. That probably would have been a good idea with the old washer, but the variety of options and the sheer “smartness” of the WashTower has made me a more mindful clothes wrangler.

A few words about accessibility

I write a lot about making technology more accessible to people with disabilities. How well appliances do that is a frequent concern for potential buyers. Like a lot of smart gadgets, the availability of an app is what makes the WashTower a reasonable choice for someone who can’t see or press buttons on an LCD display. The LG ThinQ app is accessible to VoiceOver on iOS. The display is bright, with large text and extremely good contrast, for those with low vision. And the location of the display puts it in easy reach for wheelchair users.

But how well does it wash and dry?

Smart features aside, we’ve been happy with the WashTower’s results. If you’re looking for a proper performance review, a couple of outlets have put it through its paces.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]