Monday 16 June 2014

My experience with an Android phone

To start with, I am not going to share my experience with my first Android phone. Infact, this is my experience with my current Android phone and I am going to talk about the accessibility features here.
It was a long call from one of my friends in Pune. As we were talking of several things, he suggested to me to buy a new handset called MotoG which was introduced just a few days back in India. I had never heard of this news and was quite excited.
This excitement was because of two reasons: This phone comes with stock Android (uncustomized Android OS from Google itself); accessibility is quite good. But there was one snag here. This phone doesn’t have a key pad; in other words, it’s a full touch phone.
This was quite a shock to me as I had never used a full touch phone. However, there are sever visually impaired users of iPhone which is a full touch phone. So why not a try? This thought drove me crazy and I bought this phone in the end.
When I talk about the accessibility features of my phone, I have to mention its specifications. This phone comes with Android 4.42 (Kitcat). This phone is powered by 1.2 GHZ processor and one GB RAM. It has 4.3 inch screen and has 16 GB of inbuilt memory of which 12 GB is usable. It has five MP primary camera and a front camera too.
Now that I have gone through its specifications, I can share its accessibility features. Google has remarkably improved the accessibility features in this Android version. To talk about a few, Google has introduced or more appropriately brought from iPhone the concept of accessibility shortcut. This allows a visually impaired user to turn on the accessibility mode without a sighted user’s help. However, remember to turn on this feature at Settings>accessibility.
Besides this, the navigation has been made much easier in this phone. For every touch on the screen, the phone provides a sound and a vibration alert. One goodnews is that they have improved the sound alerts quite listenable.
Apart from double tap activation, Google has introduced labling feature which will enable us to lable buttons which we don’t understand. Of course, we must take the help of the sighted users to determine the name of each button. Gestures are introduced to read out the spelling of the spoken text. Besides these the voice search and the voice dictation are quite useful.
The keyboard and the key pad features are worth to mention. They are not as bad as I thought. I can navigate through the keyboard without lifting my finger and I can lift the finger from the character which I want to enter in the box. Naturally, this needs a lot of practice as I’m new to this.
On the whole, if not 100%, at least this phone is 80% accessible and worth investing.
Written by
Sathish 
KVTC Access Team



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