Welcome to the thirty-seventh episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- Getting started with the operating system 0:00
- Input methods 20:54
- Braille support 29:25
- Working with the camera 39:27
- Working with the web 47:42
- Final thoughts 56:46
- Closing and contact info 1:03:31
Do you have any thoughts on iOS versus Android, or any other technology topic? Be in touch via email, either by attaching an audio clip or just writing something down, and send it into [email protected].
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm Jonathan Mohsen welcoming you to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This episode is devoted to a comparison of iOS and Android from a blindness perspective. Recorded at our recent national convention, Karl Belanger and I compare Apples and Androids.
What I want do first is set some expectations so when you come out of this, we are not going to have picked a winner for you. We're not going to tell you which one is the best one. What we hope to be able to do is talk with you about the various ways that you interact with these devices and help you to form a view about which one might be right for you, or at least make you curious if you've been on one side of the fence for a little while, and you may be wondering whether the grass on the other side is greener or not.
I think also too that what you'll find when you use one of these devices is sometimes it's the little things, it's the nuances. It's just the way it all hangs together that can sometimes make a difference for you in terms of which one you might prefer. So that said, let's get in and talk about what happens when you run an iPhone for the first time.
So I'm going to be focusing on iOS and Karl is going to be focusing on Android. I am an iOS user regularly and those of you who know my work know that from time to time I have pointed out some of the significant bugs that creep into iOS. But for all that, I think that it is a robust experience for the most part, it is well thought through. And one of the things I'm finding increasingly is that you can use an iPhone as a content creation device as well.
So I compose quite a lot of nicely formatted documents on my iPhone these days and it gives me a lot of freedom to work. So let's get into talking about starting VoiceOver on an iPhone. And you do that on any iPhone that's on the market now with a triple click of the side button, there are no longer many physical controls on an iPhone. The side button is one. It performs a range of functions including triple clicking it to start VoiceOver.
Now there's nothing that really tells you that, so you've got to have studied ahead of time or maybe you, you're getting your first iPhone, you might have somebody in the store or someone you trust setting that up for you. That's a bit of a contrast from the Mac actually, where if you start a Mac and you leave it long enough and you don't touch the thing, a little voice comes on and tells you if you're blind and you want this thing to talk, you press Command + F5 to get it going.
There's nothing quite like that in VoiceOver on the iPhone. What's also significant is that the tutorial, which is quite recent to iOS, they didn't have a tutorial for a long time, whereas TalkBack has, and they've just introduced us now, you used to have to go to third-party apps to get the same sort of thing.
That tutorial doesn't start automatically either when you first launch VoiceOver. So someone needs to help you or you need to have read up on how to execute basic gestures ahead of time so that you can get into that tutorial. There are two learning modes on the iPhone.
There's one that's been around for a long time and that's called VoiceOver practice. And you might think of this as the keyboard learn mode in NVDA or JAWS or a Narrator for that matter where you put your VoiceOver into this mode and you can execute any gesture you want and it will tell you what it does.
That can be very handy when you just want to get a feel for something, particularly some of the more convoluted gestures, which I'll talk about in a little bit. So that's VoiceOver practice.
And then there is the VoiceOver Tutorial, which is new. There doesn't seem to be any way to launch the VoiceOver Tutorial even from Siri. You can't tell it to open the VoiceOver Tutorial. So the closest we can get to is to open VoiceOver. So I'm going to do that now. Open VoiceOver settings.
VoiceOver:
Settings, voice control, off button.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now I'm using Eloquence for this demonstration and one of the things that I think is really great about iPhone is that it does now have Eloquence built in. That is a remarkable achievement on Apple's part because everybody was telling us, "Oh, the days of Eloquence are over. It's outdated. It's unsupported."
And then a couple of years ago, Apple came out with VoiceOver and Eloquence talking together and there were great angels singing and choirs everywhere and the world was happy. It was a great time. All right, let's flick through.
VoiceOver:
I track it, side button, camera control, button, accessibility, heading, settings, accept, personalized, vision, VoiceOver on, VoiceOver, switch button on. Double tap to title setting.
Jonathan Mosen:
So we'll go through now. And what you hear there is a hint and that is a feature of VoiceOver, which you can disable, but if you're just getting started, it will give you an extra little hint. And this is like the tutor voice that we've had in JAWS for some time. It just tells you a little extra thing about how to engage.
VoiceOver:
VoiceOver speeds items on the screen. Tap once to select an item. Double tap to activate the selected item. Learn more. What's new in VoiceOver. Link.
Jonathan Mosen:
That is also you can now-
VoiceOver:
Double tap to activate.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can now go in and find out what is new in VoiceOver.
VoiceOver:
VoiceOver practice button. VoiceOver tutorial button.
Jonathan Mosen:
This is the VoiceOver tutorial, so I'll double tap it.
VoiceOver:
Collections page, learn how to use VoiceOver. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use VoiceOver to navigate and use your iPhone. Some instructions may not apply to you customize VoiceOver and VoiceOver may be restricted throughout the tutorial. Button.
Jonathan Mosen:
When you go into this for the first time, you're taken to this screen and it's pretty friendly. So I'm going to flick right and just show you a couple of screens of this because it's very thorough.
VoiceOver:
VoiceOver tutorial. Heading. Done. Button. Collections page. Learn how to use voice... Collections. Continue from where you left off. VoiceOver settings. Button. Learn introductory VoiceOver correction gestures. Button.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's where you would start. So if you've never used this tutorial before and I have just to become familiar with it for this presentation, you will be taken to this first screen that I'll show you now.
VoiceOver:
Select the next item. VoiceOver automatically reads aloud the selected on-screen item like text or a button. You can control which item is selected by moving to selection. To select the next on-screen item, swipe from left to right with one finger. Swipe one finger from left to right now to move to the next page.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I'm going to do that and you'll hear it gives me a happy, joyous sound when I do the right thing.
VoiceOver:
Continue. Select the previous item. You'll just practiced the gesture to select the next item. To select the previous on-screen item, swipe from right to left with one finger. Swipe one finger from right to left now to move to the next page.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay, let's see if I can manage that. So I'm going to flick left.
VoiceOver:
Swipe one finger from right, activate an item. Some items can be activated, which performs their default action. This is similar to clicking the mouse on the item or pressing a button to submit a form. To activate the selected item, tap the screen twice with one finger, double tap with one finger to move to the next page.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I'm going to practice the double tap gesture and then we'll stop this.
VoiceOver:
Double tap with one... Practice navigating. Now, you'll practice the commands used.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm just going to stop that. But that gives you an example of the interactivity of the VoiceOver tutorial. It isn't simply telling you what to do, it's actually telling you what's going on and whether you are doing it correctly or not. So that's the tutorial. Now in the time I have remaining, I just want to talk about some of the gestures. The gesture set from the iPhone is pretty legendary now and it's been used to perform similar functions on a range of devices.
As we just heard, you can flick left or right to go through different elements. You can touch the screen and that will tell you what you have touched but not actually activate it. To activate it, you would double tap. There are up to six fingers that VoiceOver can recognize at a time. This is really optimized for Braille input, but usually you would have as many as four fingers on the screen.
You can tap single tap, double tap, triple tap, quadruple tap. You can swipe up and down and left and right. You also have the magic tap. This is a pretty significant thing in VoiceOver. The magic tap allows you to start and stop media playback to start dictation.
It basically works out the thing that you're likely to want to do at any given time and give you quick access to that. Similarly, there's a two finger scrub gesture which will activate the back button. But what I've found is that that is not supported in all applications and there is the rotor.
This is a critical gesture in iOS and some find it a difficult gesture to master. You kind of put your finger on the screen and you rotate counterclockwise or clockwise like a dial on a phone. The good news about the rotor and other gestures is that every single gesture in iOS is configurable.
In VoiceOver, you could come up with a completely alternative user interface if you want to. You can also add and subtract items from the rotor. So typically you'd use the rotor to choose whether when you flick up and down, you're navigating by word or by character by line, heading, form control.
You might want to adjust speech rate and change your voice. There are also functions for magnification and things like that, so we'll get to those later. You can also take functions out of the rotor and put them in a quick settings feature if you use them slightly less. And when you are on an item like say mail or messages, you have the actions rotor where you can perform context-sensitive actions based on where you are.
There are also gestures that are generic to the iPhone that VoiceOver still supports, such as flicking up from the bottom of the screen until you feel one vibration to get to the home screen.
You flick up a little longer to get to the app switcher and you can also flick down a little until you feel one vibration to get to the control center and a little further to get to notification center. So that's a brief overview of how you get started and how you start to navigate with the iPhone.
Karl Belanger
Android has a number of features similar to TalkBack as well for getting started getting going. Android's voiceover gesture when you're setting up a phone for the first time is to do hold down both volume keys. So what will happen is when you turn the phone on, again, there is no audible feedback or indication at first, but if you hold down both volume keys for a second or two, you'll get a prompt to release the volume keys and then hold them down again to enable TalkBack. And once you do that, TalkBack will start. And when TalkBack starts on first time setup on a new phone, it starts right into the tutorial.
And we'll welcome you to the first page of the tutorial, give you a brief description of TalkBack and then give you the opportunity to step through the tutorial or just leave it entirely and go on with the setup. So that is one benefit of TalkBack there.
There's also an accessibility button on the initial setup page so that when you go with TalkBack it will provide or you can turn on TalkBack using the screen if you have a sighted person handy.
Once you're in the phone, TalkBack has again the tutorial in settings and all the gestures are customizable as well. So I'll pull my phone in and we'll get into the tutorial. So I'm in TalkBack settings.
TalkBack:
Open. Tutorial and help. Heading 18 of 21. Speech rate. Speech rate 100, speech rate 100. TalkBack tutorial. TalkBack tutorial. Navigate up. Speech rate 100%. TalkBack tutorial. Swipe right to select a topic.
For the best experience, turn on TalkBack before getting started. Basic navigation, move between items, scroll, use menus, and more. Double tap to activate.
Karl Belanger
So as you hear, we have a number of different categories. I'll quickly swipe through these. You can also hear we have the hints, just like with VoiceOver. So we have basic gestures.
TalkBack:
Text editing type, select, edit, copy and more. Reading navigation, read by word or character and jump between links, controls or headings. Image descriptions. Try getting descriptions of images. Voice commands. Control TalkBack with your voice, find on screen, look for specific items on screen.
Everyday tasks, learn how to make calls, send messages and more. Practice gestures. Try different gestures to learn what they do. Every... Voice... Image... Reading navigation... Text... Basic... Swipe right to select... Available. Use tap with-
Karl Belanger
We'll go into the basic gestures tutorial.
TalkBack:
Basic navigation, move between items, scroll, use menus and more. Welcome to TalkBack. Navigate up button. Welcome to TalkBack, page one of six. TalkBack provides spoken feedback so that you can use your device without looking at the screen. TalkBack can be helpful for people who have difficulty seeing the screen. If you want to quickly turn TalkBack on or off using your volume keys, you can set up a shortcut and TalkBack settings, then TalkBack shortcut.
When TalkBack is on, the focused item on the screen is spoken out loud. Swiping right will move to the next item and swipe... Next button. Drag your finger to explore. Navigate up button. Drag your finger to explore. Page two of six. You can also focus on an item by dragging your finger across the screen. Try this now by touching the screen and dragging toward the bottom left corner until you find the next button. Next button, double tap to activate.
Karl Belanger
So I just did that and the iPhone has this feature as well where you can touch a finger on the screen and move it around to find icons there. I'll double tap on that.
TalkBack:
Scroll by swiping up or down with two fingers. Navigate up. Scroll by... Page three of... You can practice on this screen until you find the next button. Try scrolling by swiping up or down with two fingers in list. Try scrolling by swiping up or down with two fingers.
Karl Belanger
All right, so this is one way TalkBack differs from VoiceOver is that Android has one finger scrolling gestures to scroll up or down or change pages right and left. And the way TalkBack uses those is it keeps the same Android scrolling gestures but just adds an extra finger to them.
So two fingers swipe up would be like scrolling down in the list, two fingers swipe right or left will change pages like on your home screen as opposed to the three finger gesture that VoiceOver has put in there. And we'll get to more of those in a minute.
TalkBack:
Great job. You've scrolled to the bottom of the screen. Swipe right to find the next button out of list. Next button. Double tap to activate. Add one finger to system gestures. Navigate up button. Double tap to... With three fingers...
Karl Belanger
We could keep going through this and it would walk us through the different gestures. There is a voice commands, there's a bunch of different gestures and things like that. So let's get out of this tutorial.
TalkBack:
Add one... Navigate up. TalkBack tutorial. TalkBack... Navigate up. TalkBack settings. TalkBack tutorial 19... Customize menus nine of... Cover proximity... Customize gestures eight of 21. Fingers to view.
Karl Belanger
With TalkBack, you can customize your gestures, you can customize the menus, which includes TalkBack's version of the rotor and all that other stuff. So just as with the iPhone you can customize many different aspects of TalkBack's capabilities and how it works. So let's get into some of the TalkBack gestures. Just as with the iPhone, you have your one finger swipe left and right to move between things.
Double tap to activate things. One areas where TalkBack differs is you have what are called angle gestures. These are a slightly older feature in TalkBack. You can certainly use TalkBack and never have to touch these things, but some people find them useful. I like them for certain things. And so it will tell you swipe up then right, Or write them down to do a gesture. And the way to get these to work I have found is to kind of not too distinct angles.
It's not like you're doing a letter T or a print letter T or print letter, like you're doing kind of a curve. So you swipe right and then angle your finger down. Hence the name angle gestures. It's not just two straight lines. And those can be very useful because you can have your one finger gestures assigned to stuff, 2, 3, 4 fingers.
And then you can also have these angle gestures to add even more flexibility. So they can be a little hard to get used to, but if you can get the hang of it, they can be quite useful. Now speaking of the rotor on iOS TalkBack instead of having a rotor has what they call their reading controls menu, which is where you swipe with three fingers.
By default you can swipe and any direction with three fingers, right or down will go one way through the menu, left or up will go through the other.
And then just as with the VoiceOver rotor, you have characters, words, lines, paragraphs, and then you can also add things. There's a specific like three finger triple tap for screen curtain, but you can add things like screen curtain, swiping through results in screen search volume, audio docking, various other things to this quick menu that you can then get access to with a three finger swipe and you swipe up and down to change the options that way.
And all that is customizable through TalkBack settings in the customized gestures screen. Another feature that TalkBack has that is different from iPhone is the concept of the TalkBack menu. So if I tap the screen with three fingers...
TalkBack:
TalkBack menu, describe image in list, double tap to activate.
Karl Belanger
It brings up a menu of common TalkBack features, which can somewhat change depending on what we have.
TalkBack:
Describe screen. Read from focused item. Copy last spoken phrase. Screen search. Hide screen. Voice commands. TalkBack settings. Text to speech settings. Braille display settings. Close button out of list.
Karl Belanger
And so that's the TalkBack menu. A couple other things that can pop up in there is if you have, just as with iOS, if you're focused on an item that has actions, it will allow you to access those actions either from the TalkBack menu or from the three finger swipe reading controls menu to navigate through those. So that is a little bit about gestures for both operating systems. As you can hear, they both have a fairly comprehensive suite of gestures.
Oh, I should mention TalkBack also does have the magic tap just like VoiceOver for phone and calls and things like that. But either way, they both have a fairly comprehensive, fairly similar suite of gestures, one to four fingers to go through and navigate your phone. They're both heavily customizable and yeah, they each do things slightly different. And it really boils down to what your preference is for the gestures.
Jonathan Mosen:
There are a lot of ways in which you can get content into an iPhone. When you go into an edit field, like a text field or anything like that, the rotor is context-sensitive. So when you get to that kind of an edit field, you will find that on the rotor, the touch typing, direct touch typing and standard typing menu appears. It doesn't appear when it's not relevant and that just declutters the rotor a little bit.
So in standard touch typing, which is what happens when you start an iPhone, what you find is that you flick around the screen when you find the character you want, you can either double tap it or you can split tap it, which means you hold one finger somewhere on the screen and then you tap with another finger and that's how the iPhone will behave by default because it's pretty foolproof.
You just flick around to the character you want and then you double tap it. It can be laborious though. So Apple eventually introduced what's called the touch typing mode where you flick around the screen, you drag your finger around the screen and you find the character that you want and then you lift your finger. And when you get used to this, it's actually really quick because it's kind of like a gesture.
You're rolling your finger around the screen when you're close to the character you want, and then when you hear it, you just lift your finger and it has entered the text. So that can be quite efficient. Now for people who really get to grips with the slab of glass, you can also enable what's called direct typing and that disables any VoiceOver functionality on the keyboard other than giving you a little bit of feedback because the idea here is that you use the keyboard as a non-VoiceOver user would.
So if you've got a really good spatial awareness of how big your particular touch screen keyboard is, you can type very quickly. This way it takes a bit of practice. But let's also not forget that there is also correction available on the iPhone. So even if you're not precise, normally the iPhone will correct any typos that you make. So maybe when you have some time to experiment with this, if you've not tried direct typing before, give it a shot because you may find that it speeds you up considerably.
You can also input text using a Bluetooth keyboard. The Bluetooth keyboard support on iPhone is extensive and powerful. You can navigate by headings, by form controls, a range of things like that. You can have keyboard echo set to nothing. If you're a fast touch typist with a Bluetooth keyboard, you can have word echo, characters, or characters and words.
And the keyboard echo can be set differently depending on whether you're using a virtual keyboard or a physical keyboard. So the settings can be specific to each one. Also, you can dictate, and I like that, I'm a dictator. Don't tell anybody. And Apple dictation is pretty good and it's getting better. On Access On shortly, I'm going to review a new keyboard that I've installed recently because you can install third-party keyboards in iOS.
And this one is called Wispr Flow and it has the most remarkably accurate dictation I have ever seen in my life. And you can just speak to this, you don't have to give it punctuation. It is remarkably accurate. I even got some emails done yesterday in the crowded BWI airport. It's absolutely amazing. And for now it is free.
And you can also use things like voice commands. Apple has a very powerful shortcuts feature, so you can set up quite complex commands to have certain standard texts sent to you.
One thing I will say in closing is that you can also use keyboard abbreviations. So for example, I have a shortcut called UBX. When I type UBX in the space bar, I usually do that in the Uber app and it will send a message to the driver to say, "I'm blind." It shows the white cane emoji so that people understand I'll be standing there with a cane and if you can look for me or toot your horn or whatever when you get there, that will be great.
I also have another one called LFM, which stands for look for me. And I type that because Lyft has a much smaller character count than Uber does, which means I have to be very concise, which is really hard for me, but you've got to do what you've got to do. So that's a brief look at keyboard input. I have deliberately left Braille out because we're coming back to that shortly.
Karl Belanger
So similar to iPhones, Androids do have the full text keyboard input feature. Android behaves a little differently, so it defaults to what iOS calls touch typing, where you move your finger around, you hear the letter and then you lift up to enter the letter on that your finger is on. There is a standard typing equivalent mode, but it is hidden in voice over's advanced settings.
So you have to go to voice over settings and then find the advanced settings option. And down in the middle of the advanced setting is a typing behavior option where you can choose, have it do the touch typing mode or have the standard where you move to key and double tap. So I am actually in the global-
TalkBack:
Open Gemini Live.
Karl Belanger
Gemini app
TalkBack:
Button. Hello, Karl. Ask Gemini. Edit box. Showing English. US Q-W-E-R-T-Y.
Karl Belanger
All right, so now my keyboard is up as I move my finger around the screen.
TalkBack:
Capital H, capital G, capital D, capital X, capital Z, shift enabled. Shift.
Karl Belanger
All right, so I could turn off the capital if I wanted. One nice thing about Android is that they do have a number row above the letter key. So in iOS, you have to go into the numbers keyboard, but on Android it's just so if I touch on the screen...
TalkBack:
Y. Proofread. T. Proofread. GIF keyboard. Research. GIF keyboard. T, F, Z. Symbol keyboard.
Karl Belanger
Of course it's not showing up for what-
TalkBack:
Open feature. Video. GIF keyboard. T, tango.
Karl Belanger
In most applications it does have-
TalkBack:
Alternative. Delete. Five deleted. Clipboard. Clipboard. Proofread. GIF keyboard. Capital R, Romeo.
Karl Belanger
Oh, it normally is enabled on my thing.
TalkBack:
Actions available, use tab with three finger. Delete.
Karl Belanger
You can also do, if you hold the key down, it'll give you alternate inputs like accented characters. iPhone has something similar. TalkBack also has the ability to use multiple keyboards. It has the ability to dictate all that sort of stuff. And then in the bottom right corner, we'll get to Braille in a bit.
TalkBack:
Switch input method, button.
Karl Belanger
You have a switch-
TalkBack:
Double tap to activate, double tap and hold.
Karl Belanger
You have a switch input method button, which will let you choose between your active keyboards and flip between them and then it will remember which keyboard you chose last time and default to that keyboard next time. So you can have the Google keyboard, you can have the Samsung keyboard, you can have all the different keyboards available that you may want to try and you can easily and quickly switch between them.
The TalkBack menu when you're in an edit field has options for editing and selecting and copying text, moving your cursor around. You can swipe up and down when you're focused on a text field that'll move it by whatever reading control you have set, character, word line, et cetera.
Android does not currently have to my knowledge a version of VoiceOver's, direct touch typing feature. So if you're a big fan of that, that may be a point against Android for you. But either way, both can do typing very well. Both are pretty reasonably paced.
Again, with Android, if you're using an inexpensive phone or an older phone, you may get some additional lag when moving between keys, depending on what app you're using and how many other things you have open. So the efficiency can be impacted somewhat there, but otherwise they're both pretty similar and straightforward to each other.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's just talk about Braille in general. The iPhone and VoiceOver has been around since 2009 and Braille users have really helped to shape the state of Braille on iPhone and at the National Federation of the Blind, we can take a lot of pride in that. We have a lot of Braille users who have really made sure that the iPhone is a great experience with Braille. Now sometimes it breaks and sometimes we may have some words to say about that, but when it's behaving well, it is a very good experience.
There are many Braille language tables that are supported on iPhone. There are system tables and in recent times, iPhone has also started to support the Liblouis tables as well, which is an open source Braille translator that many of us contribute to. You can connect a wide range of Braille displays.
They support all of the common Braille displays via their own distinct protocols and Apple was very quick to adopt the human interface device driver standard for Braille, which is something that we've had to work pretty hard on with them, the manufacturers.
So it's good to see that Apple did come to the party quite quickly there. Braille is fully configurable. So if you connect a Braille display to your iPhone and you don't like some of the keyboard assignments, you can reassign them. And in fact, if I can just look ahead very briefly to iOS 26, you will find that that is even more the case with that.
So there seems to be significant progress with every release. With Braille, you can support uncontracted Braille and contracted Braille with iPhone. You can input when you connect your Braille device via QWERTY input.
If you have a device like the APH Mantis or with Braille input, if you have a more conventional Braille display with Perkin style entry, there is some support in iOS already for multi-line Braille displays such as the Monarch, which is something that we're very excited about at the National Federation of the Blind, the way that the Monarch is evolving and changing things for students, particularly in STEM subjects and that will continue to advance in forthcoming releases of iOS.
But even now, if you are fortunate enough to have a multi-line Braille display, you will find that you can make some adjustments there as well as a physical Braille display. iOS has something called Braille screen input. Now Braille screen input has evolved over time.
Originally it was just another form of inputting text into your device and the way to think about this is that your touch screen becomes like a Braille keyboard and there are two broad ways that it might do that. One is that in certain modes it mimics the shape of a Braille cell. So you would have dots 1, 2, 3 along the left-hand side and dots 4, 5, 6 along the right-hand side and you would input into it like you were making the shape of the cells that you want. It supports all grades of Braille.
The other way that you can input Braille is in tabletop mode where the phone essentially becomes like a virtual Perkins keyboard.
So the keys are going across the screen. Now that was pretty cool and it sped a lot of us up considerably, but in iOS 18, Apple really did take it to the next level by making Braille screen input away by which you could control the whole phone. There is now a command mode in Braille screen input, and when you switch to that, it pretty much means that you can use the device exclusively as a Braille only device if that's what you want to do.
You can launch applications, you can use the same Braille keys on a virtual keyboard as you have on a physical keyboard. So you can navigate the screen by just pressing dot four when you're in command mode, which will take you to the next item. That's a standard Braille navigation paradigm pressing dot one will take you back to the previous item, which again is standard Braille paradigm dots 1, 2, 3 to the top dots 4, 5, 6 to the bottom.
And all of this is now possible in command mode on Braille screen input. And I do know of people who now use their iPhones as a Braille only device. They literally never come out of Braille screen input once they get the phone going, they've entered their password to begin with, they can stay in Braille mode.
And the fact that we have that degree of configurability of essentially making our choice as Braille uses to use this in any mode is a very significant achievement on Apple's part. So that's a brief overview in the five minutes I have of Braille.
Karl Belanger
Google I will admit has been a bit of a later comer to the area of Braille on Android, but a few years ago they have rolled out a Braille keyboard. It also for a long time had an app called BrailleBack, which provided support for Braille displays on Android that is now gone. They have rolled it into the TalkBack interface directly, which I will show in a minute. They have now done a Braille keyboard, as I said, where you can have it just as your default keyboard.
So anytime you double tap on an edit field or it prompts for input, it will bring up the Braille keyboard and you can type and do what you want. There is no command mode yet, though I certainly hope Google will do that as well. When you're doing at Braille display, everything is through the Braille display settings and it will show your available devices up top, you can pair with them.
Android now supports most of the same Braille displays that iOS does. One important caveat is that due to the way Google did the Braille human interface device, it will only work with devices that require the HID protocol, mainly the Brailliant devices and the Mantis if you're running a phone with Android 15 or later. So if you have an older phone or one that hasn't been updated to Android 15, it will work with most other Braille displays.
The Focus displays, the Salvas displays, the older HumanWare displays, but it will not work with the newest displays that only require the HID protocol and that is because that is at an Android level change. So once you get into either of these, you can pair your display, it'll connect, and then they have a full suite of gestures that you can use to move around and engage with things. Android does their gestures on a Braille display a little difference than you might be used to on say iOS or Windows Screen reader.
They use space dot one, space dot four et cetera to move by line on the screen, but then they use dots one, two and seven or the backspace key and dots four, five and eight or the enter key as your flick left and right gesture equivalents and then they use dots 2, 3, 7 and 5, 6, 8 to adjust your reading control and just dots 3, 7 or 6, 8 to adjust it.
So it works, it does well, but it is definitely a little different than you might be used to with the Braille display on other platforms. So that is something to be aware of. Aside from that, I'll give a brief demo of Braille keyboard entry.
TalkBack:
Add attach. Ask Gemini. Edit box. Double tap and hold to long press actions available. Use tap with three fingers to view.
Karl Belanger
All right, so I'm still in Gemini like I was earlier.
TalkBack:
Showing Braille keyboard, screen away mode.
Karl Belanger
I'm in the screen away mode, but this has both the screen away and tabletop as iOS does.
TalkBack:
Cap T-H, This is a, cap B-R-L, Braille, cap T, type D, E, M. Dots 2, 5, 6. Demo.
Karl Belanger
And you can change the keyboard echo and things like that. You can use three finger swipes.
TalkBack:
Words.
Karl Belanger
Right or left to change the granularity. So if I wanted to make an edit.
TalkBack:
Demo typing Braille, A, A, characters, space, capital B-R-A-I-L-L-E, space.
Karl Belanger
And et cetera, and you can go through and do your edits and select things and whatever. They have a bunch of gestures for moving by line, word, character, all those different things. So there's a pretty robust keyboard setting.
TalkBack:
Swipe up setting with three fingers for more options. Dots four, five, dots four, five deleted.
Karl Belanger
I'm going to swipe up with three fingers.
TalkBack:
Keyboard hidden, Braille keyboard options, switch to uncontracted Braille in list, double tap. Update dot positions. Review gestures. Open tutorial. Settings. Close button out of list. Double tap. This is a Braille typing demo showing Braille keyboard. This is a Braille type... Add attachments button. Double tap to... Hold to open input method picker.
Karl Belanger
A little demo of Braille screen input on an Android phone. I do really like that it just comes up whenever you pop into a text field if you have that set as your keyboard. But I do hope Google can do a command mode soon.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'd like to talk about the camera a little bit in fact, because we have an iPhone 16 pro max that we're demonstrating here, and it is important to say that there are some differences between what you will get out of your camera as a blind person depending on the kind of phone that you have. If you have a pro model iPhone that does give you access to a range of blindness specific functions that can be pretty compelling.
One of them is people detection and that for me was incredibly useful during the height of the pandemic because you could exercise safe social distancing by being told when you were getting close to people. It is still useful. For example, yesterday we boarded a Southwest flight and the cool thing about that is that you can choose your seat so you can use people detection to actually find out where the closest window seat is that's not occupied.
I promise you it's not for the view, it's for the sleep. So it's a very handy feature. There are also other technologies like point and speak. To be fair, I've had mixed success with point and speak in the camera, but the idea is that if you find yourself using say a touchscreen based coffee machine at your work or anything that's got a touchscreen, point and speak is supposed to allow you to hover your finger over a touchscreen and tell you what it is that your finger's hovering over so you can press the right thing. There's also things like door detection, furniture detection, a range of other things, and you can switch all of those things on as you need to.
This is another thing that is available on the rotor. And so you rotate to that function, you flick up and down to choose the item you want and you double tap to Activate the things that are of interest.
So there'll be times when you just want people detection on if you're traveling and you're looking for a seat on a bus or a train, there'll be times when maybe you're looking for doors in an unfamiliar building, you can turn that on as well. The reason why this is only possible on a pro phone is because this is extensive use of LiDAR technology and LiDAR is built into the pro phones.
You'll hear a lot about LiDAR increasingly as it makes its way into some of the new mobility devices that are being planned for blind people such as Glide, which a lot of people are talking about. Now, in addition to that, you'll want to take a photo and I think this is an area where Android has a significant edge, particularly when it comes to things like taking a selfie. But I'm going to open the camera app. Open camera.
VoiceOver:
Camera. Camera control status, camera controls button, collapse.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's just go to the right camera.
VoiceOver:
Photo and video view, camera chooser, back facing button.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm going to go to the front-facing camera.
VoiceOver:
Camera chooser, front-facing. Photo and video view. Take picture. Camera mode. Selfie zoom. Zoomed in button. Double tap the zoom out.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I'm feeling-
VoiceOver:
Near right edge.
Jonathan Mosen:
There we go.
VoiceOver:
Near bottom right edge. Near right edge. Near bottom right edge. Near right edge. Near bottom right edge.
Jonathan Mosen:
Trying to get it centered.
VoiceOver:
Near right edge. Tilt left.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay, I'm going to stop that, but what it's telling me is when I use VoiceOver, I'll just stop that talking. There we go. When I use VoiceOver to tell me what's in the camera view, it is telling me that there is a face in the frame and where it is. So as I move the camera around or I move my head around, it is telling me it's in the right edge, the top edge, etc. And eventually hopefully you'll get centered and you can take a picture when you use the rear camera.
It will also give you using apple intelligence a brief description of what the camera is seeing, which can be helpful when you are trying to take a picture of something specific so you can get feedback about when it's in the view. And then you can double tap the take picture button to take a picture once you've done that. Apple intelligence in particular is pretty sharp about finding the photos you want.
So you can say find photos that I took in New Orleans in July 2025 and Apple intelligence will do that for you. If you have a guide dog and you've taken some cute pics of your pooch, you can tell it to find dog pictures on your phone and it will do that.
It will give you a basic description of the picture, but you can also share that picture with other tools like seeing AI or any number of other third-party AI tools to get descriptions of what it is that you've taken. So there's a brief overview of the camera.
Karl Belanger
Google have added a feature to the Android camera called guided frame. Now it doesn't offer some of those cool LiDAR that the pro iPhone does like door detection and other things like that. But it does offer a very good way to know what faces are in the frame, whether it's cropped and it will actually do a countdown to take the photo once you have people in the frame and it can also detect pets and other objects and things like that.
TalkBack:
Switch to long exposure mode. Switch to action pan. Switch to back camera. Photo gallery. Take photo button. Double tap to activate actions available, use tap with three fingers to view. One face in frame. Move your phone left and down. One face cropped. Move your phone left and up. One face in frame. Move your phone left and up. Hold for photo. 3, 2, 1. Movement in frame. Countdown canceled.
One face in frame, move your phone slightly left and up. One face in frame, move your phone slightly left and up. One face cropped, move your phone slightly left. Hold for photo. 3, 2, 1. Photo taken. One face in frame, move your phone left. Photo gallery button. Double tap to activate.
Karl Belanger
That is one cool thing. And so I did that using the front facing camera. It should also work for if you're taking a picture of family or your pet, like your guide dog picture or certain other things. I was playing with it last night and I was saying I had a cup of tea on the table and it said one drink in frame and things like that so it can detect certain other objects like that. And then once you've taken the picture, you could use the TalkBack describe images to do that. Now can I take that?
TalkBack:
Take photo. Photo gallery. Take photo. Back to camera. Cast. All photos. Favorite. More option. Share. Share. Edit. Edit. Lens. Trash. Trash. Photo taken on July 8th, 2025, 9:50 A.M. Trash. Photo taken on July 8th, 2025 9:50 A.M. TalkBack menu. Describe image in list.
Karl Belanger
Sorry, I should-
TalkBack:
Double tap to activate. Get detailed image descriptions. No, thanks. Turn on. Photos. Photo taken on July 8th. Thumbs up button, A man with a light beard and a red and blue plaid shirt is wearing a gray jacket and a red tie. He's standing with his back against a gray wall. He's looking at the camera and has a serious expression on his face detected in it. Photo. Press the volume button.
Karl Belanger
It got that partially right. I'm not standing, I'm sitting in the chair. So as you can see, it will try to describe the image and you can do that with any picture you take or even pictures that are on your screen and things like that. So yeah, Android does photos pretty well, pretty accessibly and I think it's a pretty neat feature to have.
Jonathan Mosen:
I am going to go to Safari, which is the web browser on the iPhone.
VoiceOver:
Dock, messages, Safari. Double tap the... Safari. Skip the main content.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we just happen to be on the NFB website because we're surfing the site we want. You can navigate the web in a variety of ways. The rotor is pretty critical here for most purposes. So I'm going to use the rotor.
VoiceOver:
We advanced the lives of our members and... Form controls. Platform control.
Jonathan Mosen:
Form controls here. Again, what's happening here is that VoiceOver is context aware, so it knows that I'm on a web page and that web page may have form controls. On that basis, forms have come up in the rotor.
VoiceOver:
Links.
Jonathan Mosen:
And we've got links as well, similar things. So now that I have chosen links from the rotor, if I flick down...
VoiceOver:
2025 National Convention Agenda. Heading level two link.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I can double tap and it will execute that link and I can just continue to flick down.
VoiceOver:
Read more about 2025 National Convention Agenda link.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I swipe right, it will simply just take me through the web page linearly as if I were say using the up-and-down arrow keys on a web browser in Windows.
VoiceOver:
Prepare for national convention. Heading level four. The NFB National Convention is the largest gathering of blind people in the world. That is the premier event for training, support and information for the blind community.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now if I flick left...
VoiceOver:
Headings.
Jonathan Mosen:
We're on to-
VoiceOver:
14th headings.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now one thing that's important to note about VoiceOver in general in fact is that you can assign any gesture to any function. And I find this very useful on the web because I am routinely navigating by heading. If you've got a properly marked up web page, navigating by heading is often a very efficient way to get from different parts of the web page to another.
So what I've done in my own phone, and I've done it on this one here, is I have mapped a two-finger swipe right and left to navigate by heading. And that way I don't even need to use the rotor because it's a function that I use so often.
VoiceOver:
First timers guide. Heading level four. Link. Pre-convention activities heading.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I'm just doing a two finger flick right to navigate by heading. And I've also mapped a two finger flick left-
VoiceOver:
First timers guide.
Jonathan Mosen:
-to go back to the previous heading. I've also done the same with form controls because the things that I do most often, I navigate by link, heading, and form controls. So I have assigned unique gestures to all of those functions and it just makes working with the web so much more efficient because I don't have to go around the rotor and find things.
Now what that means on my personal phone is that I have taken off those duplicate functions. So since I can navigate by form control and by heading and by link without using the rotor, I don't have them on my rotor at all on my own personal phone because while the rotor is a great concept and it provides for a lot of navigation, it can get very busy. You can also navigate the web in Braille screen input. So if you go into Braille screen input.
VoiceOver:
Braille screen input.
Jonathan Mosen:
Standard commands like H for heading, C for form control, and various other functions just work in Braille screen input. You can also do the same with a Bluetooth keyboard. The functions on a Bluetooth keyboard are quite similar to the navigation quick keys that you would be familiar with on a Windows screen reader.
You can turn something called navigation mode on, quick nav mode on, and then you can also turn another mode of that on called navigation quick keys on. When you do both of those things, you can do things like just press H to navigate to heading, C for control, and on and on.
So navigating the web with the Bluetooth keyboard is very easy. It's kind of like forms mode in a screen reader. You double tap the field if you want to enter text into it, and at that point a virtual keyboard becomes available and a Bluetooth keyboard also becomes active and you can type things into a form. So I find that for shopping and other experiences, it is pretty good.
There are certain sites where I think VoiceOver and Safari is a little tricky, particularly sometimes you just find that you go into a form and for some reason you're not able to type text into that form. So it's not perfect. There are some focus mode issues there, but it's a pretty robust browsing experience. So that's browsing with Safari and VoiceOver.
Karl Belanger
Just as with the iPhone, Android has a full suite of navigation controls on the web but handles things a little differently. So it puts them just as where iOS puts them in the rotor. It puts them in the reading control. So if I swipe with three fingers...
TalkBack:
Words, lines, paragraph, headings.
Karl Belanger
If I flick down.
TalkBack:
Swipe up or swipe down to read by... Convention preparation. Heading 3. 2025 National Convention Agenda. Heading to link.
Karl Belanger
And if wanted-
TalkBack:
Double tap to activate.
Karl Belanger
And if I wanted to activate that, I could double tap.
TalkBack:
Prepare for national convention. Heading for link. Prepare for national... The NFB National Convention is the largest gathering of blind people in the world. It is the premier event. Movement. Heading one. Window Chrome homepage national...
Karl Belanger
I just flick right to get to that text. We also have-
TalkBack:
Controls.
Karl Belanger
Controls.
TalkBack:
Swipe up or swipe... Customize and control Google... Homepage, National Federation of the Blind. Previous 630, no next control. Previous button detected text 2ON. Links. Landmarks.
Karl Belanger
So we have links.
TalkBack:
And then swipe up, swipe down, national federation...
Karl Belanger
You can add other things. So by default it has headings, controls and links. And then you can add landmarks, buttons, check boxes, form fields, all those different types of things to be able to jump around the site more quickly and get access to the different pieces. So I'll just keep flicking.
TalkBack:
Buttons. Edit fields. No previous edit. No next edit field. Images and videos. Swipe up or swipe by... Federation of the Blind.
Karl Belanger
And various things like that. And you can customize all these and I'll actually show you real quick since we have the time.
TalkBack:
TalkBack menu, describe image in, describe screen, read from photo, copy last spoken... Screen search. Copy last spoken phrase. Double tap to activate.
Karl Belanger
I'm just going to make a brief tangent here. If you're, say, in an email or on the web and you have say a two-factor authentication code that you just received that you need to copy into somewhere else or someone sent you a link that's not clickable for some reason this copy last spoken phrase is awesome.
You just have it read the thing you want to copy, go into the menu, hit this copy last spoken phrase, and then go to wherever you need to paste it and just use your normal paste commands and it paste in whatever you just copied.
TalkBack:
Screen search. Hide screen. Voice command. TalkBacks. Text-to-speech settings, TalkBack. Voice, hide screen, copy, read from... close, Braille, text-to-speech. TalkBack settings.
Karl Belanger
So go to TalkBack settings.
TalkBack:
TalkBack settings, text-to-speech settings, verbose, sound, control, customize focus, customize gestures, customize menus nine of 21, customize menus.
Karl Belanger
Customize menus and then...
TalkBack:
Customize TalkBack menu, customize reading control.
Karl Belanger
Reading controls.
TalkBack:
Characters, characters, line, paragraph, headings. No next... Containers exit out of the container. Web navigation. Heading, 22 of 46.
Karl Belanger
All right. And then we go to down to web navigation.
TalkBack:
Landmarks, web navigation, landmarks, checkbox, edit fields, focusable, heading one, heading forth jump between, images and videos, list items, tables, jump, combo boxes, jump, visited links, unvisited, radio buttons, special features, heading 42 of 4...
Karl Belanger
So as you can hear there, it's a pretty comprehensive list of different web controls in Android that you can set up. Now it is not context sensitive. Those controls will always be in your reading controls, which could make things a little cluttered, but if there's certain web controls you really like, you can certainly add those and be able to navigate between them.
And if those controls appear in other apps that use web views or things like that, you'll be able to navigate within them as well. So that's a little bit about browsing.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'd be interested in a bit of a discussion, Karl, how responsive do you find the Android experience? Because I think one of the things that is quite different about Android is there's such a wider variety of hardware available third-party manufacturers, so Google makes a Pixel, but there are also big players like Samsung and also some much smaller players.
So it would be fair to say that choosing the right device and checking for latency and responsiveness could be a factor. Are there tips that you would have for people in terms of choosing a device that's not going to feel like it's wading through molasses when you're trying to use TalkBack?
Karl Belanger
Yeah, TalkBack has gotten pretty good where for the majority of Android devices, TalkBack may suffer just slightly in the latency department in general because you are dealing with many different versions of phones and operating system combinations and processors and things like that. But the biggest determinant of when and how much lag you will have on an Android phone is just going to be the overall specs.
I did a blog post a little over a year ago discussing the Motorola G Play, which is a very inexpensive Android phone. You can get a perfectly accessible, fully featured smartphone for a hundred bucks or less, but don't expect iPhone flagship snappiness. There's going to be some lag. Things are going to take longer to load.
And so it's really going to boil down to how much lag are you willing to put up with to fit within your budget. Because if you go in understanding that things are going to be slower, you might have to wait an extra second for an app to load an extra quarter.
Second, when flicking around things, you can get a very inexpensive but still very usable Android phone. Whereas if you want iPhone-like snappiness, you may want to consider a Pixel 9, a Galaxy S25, things like that. It's really the trade-off what you want in your phone versus what your budget is.
Jonathan Mosen:
The one thing I would say about this comparison is it's interesting how the two have converged more and more, and if you go a few years and we did this comparison, then what you'd find is there was no actions, rotor or actions, context menu in Android as such where you could just flip down through the options.
The angular gestures were what there were. There was BrailleBack, which was a third party utility as Karl mentioned earlier. I don't think I'm being unfair when I say that VoiceOver has kind of set the trend and what's happened is that VoiceOver on iOS has come out with a range of features and Android users or wannabe Android users have gone to Google and said, "Actually, we want this. We find it really constraining that we are limited in terms of how many fingers we can assign to a gesture."
Because some people just like some people struggle with the rotor, I think that some people really did, really did struggle with those angular gestures. And what made it more complex as well is that the angular gestures behaved slightly differently depending on the hardware that you had.
They were executable more easily on some pieces of Android hardware than others. And so Google has responded to that and that's fine. We often see in this industry somebody starts a trend and then it's well received. So other people jump on the bandwagon. We see that in the Windows screen reader industry as well.
So there's a lot of convergence now, but what I find still is that with every version of iOS that comes out, there is something significantly new taking place. So in iOS 26 for example, the Braille note-taker mode that's being introduced there is really quite remarkable. So things keep leapfrogging, I guess, and things keep evolving.
But I think the important thing that I would stress is if you played with any of these devices, whichever side of the fence you're on, if you're an Android user and you played with an iPhone three years ago or vice versa, you're an iPhone user and you played with Android three years ago, your knowledge is just so out of date.
So if you're genuinely interested, particularly if you are in the tech training field, it really is incumbent upon you to get up to date because this thing is changing so, so quickly.
Karl Belanger
One thing I would like to just quickly mention is Android fragmentation because Apple and iOS are just all in-house Apple makes. The hardware apple builds the software it can be a really nice, seamless, all-inclusive package. On Android, Google makes the software. But then as Jonathan alluded to you, you have Google, Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus, Xiaomi, various other brands that all make their phone, and they all put their little spin on it.
They all add things, take things away. Generally, the core phone features your home screen, your app screen, no matter what manufacturer using, those are going to be accessible, but you may find some of the extra bells and whistles a given manufacturer put on.
Your mileage may vary in terms of accessibility, and there's also the issue of Android updates, whereas Apple pushes iOS 26 in September. Boom, everyone's iPhone gets it. You're all up to date. Within a few days. Google pushes Android 16 or 17 or whatever.
Then each individual manufacturer has to take that version of Android and go customize it for their phone and then push it out. So sometimes that can take a couple months. Sometimes, especially for less expensive phones or older phones, that can take a year.
Jonathan Mosen:
I got to say, I missed the days when we had Android Gingerbread and KitKat and Lollipop. I was patiently waiting for a low-carb option, man. Give me a keto Android and I'm in.
Karl Belanger
Yeah, whichever Android phone, I have used Google's, I have used Samsung's, I have used Motorola's. They all work pretty well from an accessibility standpoint.
Jonathan Mosen:
That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to [email protected].
That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon, [email protected]. That's [email protected] on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcement-only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to [email protected].
That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org, or phone us, 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314. And be sure to check out the Nation's Blind Podcast right from where you heard this podcast.