![]() The iPhone’s built-in screen reader, VoiceOver, is available from the Accessibility menu in the phone’s General settings.Īs a sighted person unaccustomed to using a screen reader, relying only on spoken words to interact with my phone quickly became exhausting. But I’d never taken the plunge to use the web or applications with the screen off. Before the conference, I had tried out my phone’s built-in screen reader a few times, mostly as a way to have long articles read aloud to me. They wore headphones as they listened to screen readers speak the text on their screens. That first day, in a hotel conference room, I was struck by the number of people attentively tapping, typing, and swiping on their touchscreen phones and tablets, with the screens turned off. To be honest, I hadn’t until I attended a conference on accessible technologies. ![]() Not many designers, developers, and UX professionals have had the occasion to dive in and learn about how people who are blind or have low vision use touchscreens. ![]() Wrong: it is not impossible, and it definitely is worth the effort to make touchscreen designs accessible, particularly since touch is the interaction modality for all modern mobile devices. And if it’s impossible, then you don’t need to try. A first reaction might be, if users can’t see the screen, how can they know where to touch? It might seem impossible to design touch-driven interfaces for vision-impaired users.
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