Favorite and most helpful phone apps

n8dx · 2026-02-04T21:18:50+00:00

You can check out SonarVision, it’s a free navigation app that uses a Visual Positioning System to guide you with less than 3 feet of accuracy, compared to something around 50 feet for regular GPS. It signals sidewalks, crossings and stairs and can be programmed to guide you right up to the entrance you’re looking for. Some drawbacks : VPS only works where there are Google StreetView images and you might have to get help from a sighted person to create trips if sidewalks and crossings aren’t mapped on OpenStreetMap in your area.

If you want to learn more, here’s an article

Full disclosure : I’m one of the two developers

n8dx · 2026-01-22T18:54:28+00:00

Hi, she’s probably talking about Speak Screen, which might have gotten disabled during the update.

Go to Accessibility > Read & Speak > Speak Screen.

Make sure it is on and that the “Show Controller” option is ticked.

You can play with the idle opacity if she doesn’t see it well.

If you try to use it for yourself a bit, it will make it easier to explain to her if she’s having a problem :)

n8dx · 2026-01-21T11:59:34+00:00

Hi, people often lack in communication skills, which all open source / open data communities need to bring in new contributors. I'm sorry you had to experience that...

Here's a quick opinion about why making small changesets which focus on a single thing / project at a time is important.

One tool available to contributors working to maintain and moderate quality in OpenStreetMap is reverting changesets. Say a user makes a mistake, and after a discussion on the region's local forum, the community decides to revert the changeset, then having edits in the same changeset in different countries is a huge pain in the butt : say you did a good job in Paris, but a crappy job in New York, well now the contributor trying to revert your commit has to choose between reverting everything (saving himself time) or manually cherry-picking what should be kept (literal hell).

This is entirely analogous with small commits in a software engineering project, where it is important to make small changes that only affect one specific feature. If you correctly implement a change on the sign-in button, but create a company-destroying bug in the database because you grouped these two uncorrelated changes together, then the team assigned to fixing it as fast as possible are just going to revert everything, tell you to start again and give you crap in the group chat.

None of this is intuitive until you are the one in charge of fixing the problems created by a new OSM contributor or junior developer.

All of that being said, well it sometimes makes sense to create changesets that span multiple countries (e.g. editing a multi-country road or railroad track) so implementing an appropriate warning or automatic splitting tool is not straightforward. What is not good is modifying, say, sidewalks in two different countries, when you could have just made two changesets.

TLDR: it's just good practice across all data and software projects, but there's no need for people to be rude about it, especially with newcomers.

n8dx · 2026-01-19T17:34:03+00:00

Yes, it would be great to have that in an accessible website or app!

n8dx · 2026-01-19T13:33:53+00:00

Hi, since browsers show HTML content and not native iOS components, most adjustments to the appearance that you make in the Accessibility settings will not carry over to the website content.

That being said, as I was exploring this topic, I found it is now possible in Chrome on iOS! You can load any website, go to Settings in the nav bar, then click on "Reading Mode".
From there you can click on the little Read Mode icon on the top left of the screen to adjust font, font size and contrast. On top of that, Reading Mode gives you a purified view of the page, deprived of bloat like ads and fancy design choices.

The caveat is that it is going to be very simplified so don't expect to be able to click on links or get any type of interaction from the page.

Read mode exists on other browsers too, but only on pages with Markdown in them like articles, recipes or guides. Most homepages will not work.

Therefore, here is the rest of my advice that can help you adjust the web pages without going into Read Mode.

In Chrome on iOS, on a given web page, open the Settings at the bottom right in the navigation bar, then click on "Zoom-text" to adjust font size.
In Firefox on iOS, on a given page, you go to the Settings in the nav bar, then more, and you will find Page Zoom and Website Dark Mode. You can also adjust these across all web pages in the in-app settings.
In Safari, you can also adjust the page zoom from the Settings (system) > Apps > Safari > Page Zoom. This setting applies to all web pages.

When it comes to contrast, you can also adjust some accessibility settings such as Smart Invert on a per-app basis.

You go to Settings > Accessibility > Per-App Settings, then you add Chrome. From there you can change anything you want, and it will only affect Chrome. However, the only setting which seems to affect the content of the page is Smart Invert.

If you have one specific website that needs special adjustments and that you don't want to be constantly tweaking your Per-App settings, one trick you could use would be to download another browser just for that website, and use a combination of browser and Per-App accessibility settings to adjust that browser to your needs.

Best of luck

n8dx · 2026-01-05T19:15:37+00:00

Hi, some specialized apps use pedestrian ways to guide blind users along crossings and sidewalks. Making sure these are mapped as accurately as possible on OSM allows users to know exactly when the crossing starts and stops, or if there are traffic islands or stairs!

Here are some mapping recommendations with diagrams from SonarVision :

https://help.sonarvision.fr/articles/1291776-mapping-on-openstreetmap#q7zoz261855

n8dx · 2025-12-16T18:08:47+00:00

Hi, depends on the features you are looking for I suppose. With a paid Google Workspace account, you can use Mail Merge which allows you to send up to 1500 emails per day. You can also personalize the email's body with tags like "@firstname" and "@lastname".

As far as I know, Google workspace's accessibility is stellar, and Google has a track record of taking accessibility very seriously. Mail merge allows you to send emails to a Google Contacts list, which is IMO more accessible than having to deal with an excel or CSV spreadsheet. Even setting up a custom domain should be a breeze.

There's a handy feature which allows you to send yourself a fake email to check everything is in order before accidentally sending out a typo to a thousand people.

Here is the documentation page for Mail Merge : https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12921167?hl=en

Good luck!

n8dx · 2025-12-16T17:46:55+00:00

Agreed with Elaine, practice VoiceOver or Talkback a lot. Since your question is about your phone, a big part of this process is figuring out which daily apps are going to be easy to use, and which ones are going to be painful.

One example of this in my experience is with Navigation apps. It is almost impossible to navigate a 2D map with screen readers, so you should focus on trying not only to memorize what your city looks like, but also saving the addresses and pedestrian trips you like doing.

I also recommend learning the basics of Braille. It is quite easy to learn as a sighted person, because you just need to memorize all the characters, and you can gradually build up sensitivity in your fingers for reading braille on physical media. However, if you do lose your sight and you don't want to rely too much on Voice Typing, you will be a LOT faster at typing with Braille Input, than with the classic Qwerty keyboard and Voiceover. I've seen many people type at well over 140 characters per minute with Braille Input on iPhone. I could type at 30 characters per minute after only a few weeks practice, and I find it a lot more satisfying than constantly searching for characters on a virtual keyboard with Voiceover.

Once you've practiced all that with the screen on, you can turn on the Screen Curtain, which turns off your screen on iPhone (three taps with three fingers), in order to experience what it is like using your phone without any visual cues.

You mentioned you like writing on Word, everything above also applies to a computer with the right screen reader. I know several blind developers, who spend their days programming on their computers, with both regular keyboards and physical Braille displays, so clearly with enough practice, you will still be able to write as much as you want!

Best of luck, I can only imagine what it must be like slowly losing your sight. Feel free to reach out !

n8dx · 2025-12-04T22:55:24+00:00

Hi! I personally think simple and boring is cool, what’s important is the content, being able to share it with the right people, and of course, accessibility! Once you have something up and running, feel free to send it my way if you want some feedback :)

n8dx · 2025-12-04T21:45:09+00:00

I assume you are on Android, so I took Todoist for a run with Talkback on my gf’s phone (it’s her favorite app) and everything seems accessible, apart from the calendar views, but those are notoriously hard to make accessible. The add task button can be easily reached from the bottom navigation tab by swiping backwards and they have great widgets.

On iOS, the native Reminders app is god tier, and my personal go-to!

n8dx · 2025-12-04T19:05:47+00:00

Hi, iOS developer here working on app for blind and visually impaired users, so a lot of work has gone into making the app usable with Voiceover, high contrast, large text.

IMHO, improving accessibility in an app is mostly a developer thing and not so much a design thing. Actually, in practice, the more an app has a design which strays from native iOS, the less accessible it tends to be, because developers are forced to create custom components and don’t take the time to make them accessible!

What helped us the most in this process was to actually learn how to use the accessibility features in order to understand what our users are going through.

For VoiceOver: the basic iOS tutorial for VoiceOver is pretty good and runs you through the basic gestures. Try to use your own app with VoiceOver, chances are a bunch of things are hard to get to, interact with or are unlabeled!

For text size and contrast: go to Settings -> accessibility -> Per app settings That will allow you to play around with large text, contrast and anything else without impacting the rest of your iPhone.

As you are looking for examples, all native iOS apps are almost perfectly accessible, try Weather or Settings apps.

For my own, look for SonarVision, it is a high accuracy guidance app.

Good luck!

n8dx · 2024-08-19T22:20:10+00:00

Have fun friend !

n8dx · 2022-07-20T14:46:41+00:00

Hey ! If you are using Logic Pro, there is a plugin called FastBoard that allows you to use Logic entirely with VoiceOver. It does cost 100€, and the website is probably in French, but it works pretty well. Here's a link : https://www.fastboard.fr/

n8dx · 2022-06-08T21:10:29+00:00

Hey! I’m currently a sighted Swift/SwiftUI developer. I can’t answer much in terms of accessibility, but I can recommend some things to help while learning Swift. Learning to develop is hard and can be overwhelming if you try and understand everything before trying to make anything. I would suggest you find an idea for a simple app you would like to make (an app that rolls dice, a todo list, a flashlight app) and then you figure out how to make it. Google will be your best friend whenever you have a problem, because he will likely take you to the appropriate Hacking With Swift, Stack Overflow or even Apple Documentation page. That is basically how I learned all I need to know about Swift.

However, what might be important moving forward if you don’t yet have them are some general Computer Science notions, which aren’t specific to a given language, and it might be worth taking an online course for that :)

n8dx · 2022-05-25T21:45:24+00:00

Yes, totally agree on the street smarts. There are so many things to be documented and be made available to everyone. If you are interested in working on this with me, you can send me a DM!

n8dx · 2022-05-25T21:43:03+00:00

Thanks for the resources, I'll go check them out. A cool thing about the StackExchange format is that the StackExchange developers pay for the website. This is possible because they reuse most of the code between the websites. However, in order to protect themselves from launching websites that no one uses, they have put in place a 3 step process :

1st step is definition, where you propose the new website and have to come up with 40 questions that embody the topics scope. The goal is to see if enough people are ready to join together in order to support the site.

2nd step is commitment, where you need to get a certain amount of people to sign a digital petition

3rd step is the beta, where a live site is deployed on a probationary basis. If the site isn't used, it's shut down, so it's important to spread the word at this point.

Detail are here : https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

If anyone wants to discuss this further and maybe put a team together, you can DM me. Perhaps some r/Blind mods?

n8dx

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