I would like to know how good is the TalkBack accessibility service provided by Android for blind people. Is it really usable to them? and how big is such a community of users?
I am intending to build an app to serve this type of users and I am not sure how to integrate it with the accessibility mode. What I see is that the TalkBack service is not that good. So, I want to make my app voice enabled. Will this contradict with the Android's Accessibility mode?
I’m a totally blind software developer who uses an iPhone as their primary phone. I have played with Android 4.0 on a Novo 7 Paladin tablet. The experience was not very good and it was barely usable. From things I’ve read the accessibility of an Android device depends on the manufacturer since they are able to customize it. I’ve heard everything from an Android device being almost as accessible as an iPhone to completely unusable depending on the person and device. For more information you might want to read and post to the eyes-free android group which can be found at https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/eyes-free While I don’t have numbers to back this up and it probably varies by market if you want to specifically target blind users I’d go for iOS instead. Both the iPhone and iPod touch appear to be popular devices among blind people. In addition to the devices being popular since Apple is the only one selling devices with iOS you can be pretty much guaranteed that accessibility will work the same across all devices. This is not the case for Android devices as mentioned above.
I am from China, last month I join an exhibition and many companies showed their products. There was a company working on how to help Chinese blind people use smart phone(Android an Symbian).
They said there are 5 million blind people, only 20 thousands people using their product. But they are not expecting much blind people use their product because few blind people own their own smart phone.So they treat it as a public welfare instead of business.
I watched the demo, it was an application installed on your smart phone. With the application's help, the blind people could use many application. Very impressive.
I could post more information if you need it.
