Initial experiences with the iPhone, VoiceOver, and Color Identifier

[kestrell]

A week or so ago I posted a link to someone else's review of the iPhone app Color Identifier http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/color-identifier/id363346987?mt=8
and today A. loaded it on his iPhone, turned on VoiceOver, and let me play with it.

Note that this is the first time I have held an iPhone or used VoiceOver, so it was a pretty new experience even learning the
VoiceOver gestures http://help.apple.com/iphone/3/voiceover/en/iphddd0d7ae.html
and I'm still not certain how to perform a pinch.

Something else I learned: the aerye is not big on bright lighting--I have one overhead light and two small windows, and today is very overcast--which turns out to be kind of relevant for Color Identifier, which knows a *lot* of names for different shades of black.

Also, pretty much all of the objects in my room are either natural wood, black, or tie-dye.

What happens when you aim Color Identifier at tie-dye is pretty interesting, as it just keeps scrolling through all these different colors including their various hues and shades according to the color gradation of your tie-dye. I'm female and a former art student and even I am pretty much in awe of all the color words in this program (I mean, jambalaya and gumbo are actual colors, who knew?).

Anyway, after making the iPhone chant color names for an hour or so and then spending another hour or so trying to perfect the double tap versus the triple finger flick, I decided to check on one of the reasons I am attempting to familiarize myself with the iPhone, namely,
Papa Sangre
http://www.papasangre.com/
an audio game in which the player finds him/herself in complete darkness, otherwise known as the land of the dead. It's probably just as lucky for the developers that they are on the other side of the Atlantic (and darn, Google failed me, but I know there is a word for that, "transpond"-something), because otherwise I would probably be hanging outside their studio asking "Is it done yet?".

Instead I'm reduced to checking out the game site every day, but today I found this really cool media-narrative-games blog by one of the developers
http://allplayall.blogspot.com/
which just makes my little media studies heart go all aflutter.

Okay, off to have some dinner and find a good book to read in bed, where it isn't quite so nippy.

Comments

[duskpeterson]

You wrote:

"I'm still not certain how to perform a pinch"

My reply:

Just like you were pinching someone, except that you let your fingertips drag along the screen. If your fingernails aren't close-trimmed, you can turn your fingertips sideways to do this. I've found that slowly moving fingers in a pinch or in reverse works best.

Thanks for the recommendation of Papa Sangre, and also for the link to the VoiceOver gestures list, which I once spent two hours trying to find on the Apple site, without success. Darn them for not having a detailed site map.

[kestrell]

For what action does one perform the pinch? And yes, I only found that link to the VoiceOver gestures through a blind acccessibility blog, I think my Google search terms were:
blind iphone voiceover gestures
and that also was the only way I found the html version of the manual, since everything on Apple links to PDF.

[duskpeterson]

The main use of pinching is to zoom in and out of the text or image, in order to make the text or image larger or smaller - helpful to everyone who has some vision, not just partially sighted folk like me. This post on iPhone accessibility mentions that pinching is also helpful in copy-paste situations, but I've never used pinching that way myself, so I'm not really clear on how it works.