Accessibility Options in Voice Dream Writer App

This week, Winston Chen and the Voice Dream team released a new Voice Dream Writer app,. I am highlighting the new app here not only because Voice Dream Reader is one of my favorite apps for students who need reading supports such as text to speech, word highlighting and customized text, but also for the attention to accessibility from the Voice Dream team in this new app. Not only are the controls and the interface in the app nicely labeled for VoiceOver users, but there are even a few features specially designed to make things easier for VoiceOver users.

When VoiceOver is turned on the app can recognize this and adds three buttons for editing text to the interface (they appear in the toolbar located just above the onscreen keyboard, on the left side). These buttons are:

• Cursor:  allows the user to move the cursor by flicking up or down with one finger.
• Cursor movement unit: changes how the cursor movement takes place by allowing the user to choose from characters, words or sentences.
• Select text: selects text based on the cursor movement unit. For example, flicking up with sentences as the cursor movement unit will select the text one sentence at a time.

All of these controls are adjustable. A flick up or down with one finger will change the value (for the cursor movement unit) or navigate to/select the next item (for the cursor and select text buttons).

A three-finger swipe gesture is also supported for cursor movement and selection: a three-finger swipe up will move the cursor to the beginning of the document and a three-finger swipe down to the end, and three-finger swipes up or down will select the text from the cursor position to the beginning or end of the document.

Another nice feature of the app is the way it makes it easy to find misspelled words by opening Tools in the upper right and choosing Find Misspelled Words. You can then flick down with one finger to navigate the misspelled words in your document. When you get to a word you want to fix you have two options: you can double-tap with one finger to edit it with the onscreen keyboard or you can swipe from the right with three fingers to use the Word Finder with a phonetic search. The phonetic search will bring up a list of words that closely match the one that is misspelled in your document.  You can then choose the correctly spelled word from the list and double-tap with one finger to make the correction.

I did a short video to demonstrate some of these options in the Voice Dream Writer app. I hope you find it helpful. For more information about the app, make sure to check out the Voice Dream website.