09/11/2012
Useful iPhone apps by Samn Negron
I’ll share with you apps that have been particularly helpful to me. I’m an iPhone user, so please note that most of these apps are likely not on the Android operating system.
VizWiz (Free): An app where you can take pictures of items and send them to a live web worker, an IQ robot, or you can tweet, email or text message the photo to friends. You ask a question about the item and you receive an answer. For example, what color is this shirt? Please note that if you take pictures of inappropriate content and send it off to web workers, you are in violation of their user agreement and you’ll be banned from the service.
TextGrabber ($5 or so): An OCR solution that uses ABBYY scan engine. For the iPad and the older iPhones, this isn’t terribly useful, as the cameras are awful on those products, but on the iPhone 4S, it’s actually quite good. OCR stands for optical character recognition, which essentially means its software that will translate an image of text into text that can be read by VoiceOver and that you can edit.
LookTel Recognizer ($10): You can take pictures of items from various angles, and when you record a description of the item, next time you point the camera at the item, your audio description will be played. This works on anything from household products to faces of people. It’s a rather awesome app, if used correctly.
LookTel MoneyReader ($10): Does exactly what you think it does and it does it well.
TransitStop (Free – ad free version $3): CTA bus and train tracker tells you what train is coming and how long it’ll take to arrive. The UI is very easy to use and has been invaluable to me during travel. Most cities have an equivalent app.
HopStop (Free): Another travel planning app. You can put in your start address and end address, and your desired arrival time. The app will tell you step by step instructions how to get to your destination using public transportation and tell you what time you’d have to leave.
Sendero Look Around ($5): This app works well in conjunction with other GPS apps like Motion X Drive. No app yet gives you street by street announce the way Sendero core GPS products do like the trekker breeze; this app helps fill in that gap by telling you the next cross street. Since you can shake to refresh, it’s really quite fast and useful on the iPhone 4s. I’ve heard on the older Apple products that it can be a bit slow.
NFB Newsline (Free): It is easy for someone with a print disability to become a member of Newsline, and once the person is a member, the NFB Newsline app presents a very friendly and easy to use UI. Newsline is a service for the print disabled to have easy access to 300 newspapers and nearly 40 magazines.
AroundMe (free – ad free version $3): Yet another app that finds POIs. The cool thing about this app is that once you find a useful POI, you can have it link to one of your GPS apps on your phone and it’ll start giving you turn by turn directions to the POI. In particular, for blind people, if you want to go to a restaurant, more often than not, you can read the menu with your iPhone.
Read2Go ($20): An app used to read Bookshare books and periodicals. You can also download books with it and it gets organized in a library. You can also transfer books from your PC to the app.
Learning Ally (Free): I don’t really use this one, but it’s something I wish I had when I was in school. You can read and download RFB&D books with this app.
BlindBargains (Free): An app that gives you an easy way to navigate the BlindBargains website which gives you updates on blind related news, difficult to find bargains from online stores like Target, BestBuy.com, etc, classifieds for adaptive products for sale, and podcasts from the AT guys.
BlindSquare ($14.99): This is an amazing app. Really, I can devote an entire post on this app, alone. It does say what street you’re coming up on while you walk or are on the bus, and you can check category boxes so, as you walk, it will mention businesses to you and where in relation to you they are. This definitely raises the bar for whatever app Sendero might put out in the future. Despite the cost, this is an app I would go so far as to call a must have.
There are other useful apps that I’m continually discovering, or don’t particularly relate to visual impairments, but those are the ones I use on nearly a daily basis. Please be aware that apps that use GPS will not work properly on the iPod Touch or iPads without cellular data.
