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[n5swr]

Hello, I am blind and enjoy "birding by ear" and just wanted to share my thoughts on using Ibird Backyard with the iphone 3gs.  Apple has added great accessibility to the 3gs using the Voiceover screen reader.  The Ibird app works great with Voiceover except for a few buttons that are not labeled and you just have to click them to find out what they do.  One of these unlabeled buttons is the button to listen to the song of the selected bird, but the good news is this button doesn't move and is easy to find because it is in the bottom left corner of the screen.  

I enjoy the feature that allows you to shake the phone and you get a random bird and it's song plays automatically.  My 4-year old daughter likes to sit in my lap and we use this feature to learn about birds.  I click the button to display the pictures and she describes the bird to me.  There is also lots of text describing the selected bird, it's habitat, what it eats and so on, and this is all accessible.  

Some questions and suggestions; all the buttons should have meaningful lables; a shake option to only play random birds common in your current location as determined by the iphone gps; a search option that only lists birds in your geographic area (ibird might have this already in the identify section); a birding game or quiz that ask you questions about birds and/or plays a birdsong and you answer multiple choice questions.  The ability to merge ibird apps, example, I have ibird backyard but would like to get ibird northern and combine into one app.  
Regards -Ken

[admin]

n5swr:

Hello, I am blind and enjoy "birding by ear" and just wanted to share my thoughts on using Ibird Backyard with the iphone 3gs.  Apple has added great accessibility to the 3gs using the Voiceover screen reader.  The Ibird app works great with Voiceover except for a few buttons that are not labeled and you just have to click them to find out what they do.  One of these unlabeled buttons is the button to listen to the song of the selected bird, but the good news is this button doesn't move and is easy to find because it is in the bottom left corner of the screen.  

I enjoy the feature that allows you to shake the phone and you get a random bird and it's song plays automatically.  My 4-year old daughter likes to sit in my lap and we use this feature to learn about birds.  I click the button to display the pictures and she describes the bird to me.  There is also lots of text describing the selected bird, it's habitat, what it eats and so on, and this is all accessible.  

Some questions and suggestions; all the buttons should have meaningful lables; a shake option to only play random birds common in your current location as determined by the iphone gps; a search option that only lists birds in your geographic area (ibird might have this already in the identify section); a birding game or quiz that ask you questions about birds and/or plays a birdsong and you answer multiple choice questions.  The ability to merge ibird apps, example, I have ibird backyard but would like to get ibird northern and combine into one app.  
Regards -Ken

Hi Ken Thank you for all your suggestions. When we designed the species page for iBird we had a real quandary with the sliding button. There is so little room for labels that we had to do a lot of shortening of names to fit. The sound icon was an easy solution but I never considered a blind person may be using it and now I see how limiting that is. There are other buttons that are also missing lables like the up down arrows in the upper right corner for moving from one species page to another. Because of your message I am going to make a real effort with my developer to see if we can solve the issue so every button has a label. We have a new design for the species pages that may allow us to do this.

The shake feature has turned out to stimulate a lot of ideas from people, and yours are all good. I think the best thing we could do is have a "settings" area for it where you could narrow the species it presents when shaken to those you pick. Or how about we let you use the search engine to narrow the birds to a group or location or whatever and then say limit the shake to just those birds?  This is all moving toward a quiz module and I can tell you we are working on one that will be available as an in app purchase from inside the app itself for a very low price. I don't see us allowing the "merging" of different apps, that just doesnt make any sense to us. But please keep your ideas coming. If you are interested in being a beta tester please email me directly at admin at whatbird dot com.

BTW Another area that we have to deal with is people who are color blind. The colors on our maps are very hard for a large part of the population to use because of the colors we choose,